Felix PetruŠka

Have a Happier Day With Chemistry! ————————————-

Eyelids open; flowers blossom; tiny beaks tap cracks in eggshells; crops sprout; creatures stalk, slide, and wriggle from their burrows; teenage elk scrape hooves in the dust, lower antlers, and charge their com­petition. So: Did you—yes, you, clutching your fourth Keurig of the day and still feeling sluggish—really think you were immune to the effects of circadian rhythm, aka the clock cycle of practically all living things? Please.

The master controllers of your internal chrono­meter are two tiny clusters of neurons called the supra­chiasmatic nuclei, located behind your eyeballs in the hypothalamus. This area of the brain helps regulate the chemical factors that determine whether you feel droopy or perky. Here’s how to synchronize your activities with your hormone levels. —James McGirk

[ 1 ] Testosterone levels are high; time for nervy, jumpy activity: Free-associate. Blast emails. Pitch ideas. Crank it out. [ 2 ] Cortisol (stress hormone) levels continue to fall. Channel this convivial, ebullient energy into a meeting: You might find the cross-talk less ranty and bizarre than in the morning. [ 3 ] This is a goofy, creative time, when melatonin seeps in and your brain begins to prep you for sleep. If you want to file things away in your long-term memory, do it now. This is a good time for deep thought and close study. Felix PetruŠka

Love What You Do ——————-

“Work,” Studs Terkel once wrote, “is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread … for a sort of life rather than a Monday-through-Friday sort of dying.” So what makes some jobs soul-stirring and others soul-sucking? In the last several decades, scientists have explored that question with laboratory experiments, field studies, and big data. Their research offers five crucial lessons that apply Monday through Friday and beyond. —Daniel H. Pink

Make Progress

Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and her husband, psychologist Steven Kramer, collected nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 employees at seven companies to try to discover what constitutes a great day on the job. Their surprise finding? The single greatest day-to-day motivator—by far—was making “progress in meaningful work.” On days when people made headway—whether on fixing up Buicks or stitching up bodies—their motivation and performance soared. The lesson: Relentlessly gather feedback on how you’re progressing and celebrate progress at every turn.

Make It Your Own

Think about your job descrip­tion. Now forget about it. Fulfillment often depends on pushing outside your formal responsibilities—a process Yale School of Management’s Amy Wrzesniewski calls job crafting. In studies of hospital janitors, salespeople, and others, she and her colleagues found that the happiest people customized their jobs, often without the permission of their bosses, “to better fit their motives, strengths, and passions.” Some of what gets done each day isn’t “part of my work,” one job-crafting janitor explained, “but it’s part of me.”

Make a Friend

The Gallup Organization regularly measures US work­force engagement by asking hundreds of thou­sands of employees a set of 12 questions—including this: Do you have a best friend at work? Employees who answered yes were seven times more likely than the typical worker to be engaged on the job. Work may be all business. But it’s also social. So when you can, surround yourself with one or two people you really like and deeply trust. You’ll enjoy your job a lot more.

Make a Change

Karl Pillemer is a gerontologist at Cornell University who’s spent years interviewing thousands of people age 65 and over about, well, about all sorts of things. On the topic of work, Pillemer’s senior sages were clear: If you hate what you do, get out now. “Spending years in a job you dislike is a recipe for regret and a tragic mistake,” Pillemer writes in his book 30 Lessons for Living. “There was no issue about which the experts were more adamant and forceful.”

Make It Matter

Last year Yale’s Wrzesniewski teamed up with Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore College and several other scholars to publish a study of a decade’s worth of West Point cadets. The more than 10,000 men and women in the study had arrived at the academy with a range of motives. Some had had mainly “instrumental” motives—that is, they chose West Point to boost their eventual careers. Others had had mainly “internal” motives—they came to serve their country or become effective leaders. Years later, those with strongly instrumental motives experienced the least professional success. And even those who had a mix of noble aspirations and careerist goals lagged behind those with purer inten­tions. It’s a paradox: The best way to achieve success for yourself is to have selfless motives. In other words, ask not what your job can do for you but what you can do with your job.

Daniel H. Pink is the author of To Sell is Human, Drive, and other books about work and behavior.

Felix PetruŠka

Jeremy Liebman

Sleep On The Job ——————-

Do yourself a favor: Take a nap. In fact, do it right now. Why? Because afterward you’ll better understand and remember this very important article. Bonus: You’ll also jack up your creativity and improve your fine motor skills, according to Sara Mednick, a psychol­ogist at UC Riverside who studies naps (what a gig!). Midday naps revive you, she says, even if you got plenty of sleep the night before.

Felix PetruŠka

Of course, snoozing on the job has a bit of an image problem—it can look a little, you know, lazy (or so my boss keeps telling me). Sure, slamming Red Bull more obviously flaunts your will to soldier on, defy­ing the limits of your poor little body. But nod­ding off for a few minutes may help you bounce back far more effectively. “Sometimes caffeine actually makes you perform worse,” Mednick says. “If napping helps some ­people get more out of themselves, not allowing it would defeat the purpose of having those people in the office.”

Even better, suggests Jamie Zeitzer of the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine, drink some coffee, then take a nap. The caffeine takes about 45 minutes to kick in—enough time to duck into a quiet room or your car for some z’s—then wakes you up

smarter and happier, without a groggy sleep hangover. “But if you have to choose between coffee or a nap, go for the nap,” Zeitzer says. Not convinced? Get some sleep, then read this again. —­Robert Capps

Happy Eyes, Happy Brain ————————–

To combat the fatigue, blurry vision, and headaches you get from staring at your damn screen all day, try f.lux. This free program gradually adjusts the colors on your display as night falls, so you're not blasting your brain with blue keep-you-awake light in the evening. For novelty value and a little temporary relief on some Macs, invert the colors: Control + Option + Command + 8. Ahhhhhhh. —Rachel Gross

Typography by Crispin Finn