Use These 3 Laws Of Physics To Boost Your Productivity, Resilience, and Emotional Intelligence

#1 — “As resistance increases, pressure increases and flow decreases.”

Life provides an infinite supply of lessons for us to learn each and every day.

However, as the renowned physicist Schrödinger highlights below, the challenge lies in being able to spot these nuggets of wisdom when they’ve been hiding in plain sight all along.

The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.

— Erwin Schrödinger

I recently stumbled across my dusty old physics textbook. I last picked up this bad boy about five years ago for my Leaving Certificate examinations. This time I opened it I couldn’t help but notice the real-world application of three laws in particular, jumping right off the page at me.

I believe these laws hold potential utility in helping to shed new light on real life concepts. In particular, in relation to resilience, productivity and emotional intelligence. Packaged in a much more condensed, easily understood format.

1. Poiseuille’s Law

“As resistance increases, pressure increases and flow decreases.”

Buddhist teachings have long proclaimed that while pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

One of the great contributing factors to mental illness is the idea that we should at all costs and at all times be well. We suffer far more than we should because of how long it can take many of us until we allow ourselves to fall properly and usefully ill.

— Alain De Botton

Our knowledge and understanding of positive psychology practices such as gratitude, meditation and self-compassion have increased exponentially in recent years.

One potential downside of this positive change, however, which I believe is under-represented, is that many of us can come away with unreasonable expectations that we should be cheerful and full of beans 365 days a year.

And so when pain or sadness inevitably come knocking, we rarely afford ourselves permission to embrace these negative mood states and so allow them to pass organically. Instead, resisting uncomfortable emotions, either trying to ignore them by feigning positivity or choosing to self-sooth by bingeing on excessive amounts of junk-food, alcohol or Netflix.

This can cause problems in people’s lives.

As Poiseuille’s Law points out, when resistance to these negative mood states increases, so too does the pressure within for them to escape and be felt. This pressure can manifest in an overall reduction in flow and your ability to experience authentic levels of joy and pleasure during the positive moments in life.

We can’t selectively numb emotion. Numb the dark and you numb the light.

— Brené Brown

What’s more, the longer you resist these negative mood states, the stronger they become.

Think of an object you try to submerge underwater. The deeper you push it down, the more the pressure builds and builds until it eventually recoils and has an equally powerful reaction.

If you’re not careful in how you relate to these negative mood states by giving them the attention they demand, they have the potential to spiral out of control and take the form of maladaptive coping strategies such as substance abuse and binge eating.

By noting this principle however, you can empower yourself to be much more resilient in the face of adversity by encouraging yourself to not only accept but lean into these negatively charged feelings when they first surface so that they can take their natural course, eventually (and much more swiftly), fading away.

The path of least resistance (and distance) is straight and through.

2. Law of Conservation of Energy

“Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but it can be transformed from one form to another. Since energy cannot be created or destroyed, the amount of energy present in the universe remains constant.”

Just like energy, each of us has limited levels of focus and attention.

Many of us can often get stuck in life, becoming bored with our everyday routines and dreaming of taking up a new hobby or pastime that will restore meaning and a certain lightness to life.

In the present day, we have more information available to us than ever before with YouTube tutorials, online courses, etc. so why is it that so many of us never seem to be able to turn these dreams into realities? While a “lack of time” is most commonly used as an excuse, I don’t believe this to be the primary cause.

Instead, I think it has more to do with the very fact that we have more information available to us than ever before.

What should be a massive plus has instead manifested in our present-day climate of “Overstimulation Nation” where we find ourselves constantly bombarded with an endless stream of inputs in the form of retweets, likes, and notifications.

Social media and news platforms have gotten to a stage today where the level of neuromarketing is so advanced that our attention spans don’t stand a chance.

Employees from social media companies such as Facebook have recently spoken out about how these apps have been designed to be as addictive as possible. So much so that psychologists today estimate that 5 to 10% of Americans meet the criteria for the behavioural addiction known as social media addiction, which affects the same neural circuitry implicated in gambling and recreational drug abuse.

This sad truth hits home for me any time I’m driving past my local secondary (high) school as the school day finishes. I’m bound to pass several teenagers with their necks crouched and heads stuck in their smartphones as they walk home.

It’s a sobering sight indeed to see so many teens today can’t even walk down the street without needing to get a dopamine hit from their smartphones.

Now, I’m not suggesting you permanently delete every social media app on your phone and live the rest of your life as a digital nomad, either. But, I am suggesting that you take the time to first acknowledge the fact that your levels of energy and focus are finite, and then — if you desire — take proactive steps in ensuring that you protect and direct this focus towards consuming an “information diet” of a much higher quality which is intentional and not passive.

When we change the input into our minds, we change the output into our lives.

— Zig Ziglar

With almost every modern smartphone having a built-in app usage tracker and several free app blockers readily available, you can easily limit your use of these focus draining social media platforms. Enabling you to focus on activities that add a greater level of satisfaction to your life.

I mean long-lasting satisfaction too, not the five seconds of amusement you get on TikTok from watching a cat jumping into a fishbowl.

Be active, not passive, in how you use up your fixed energy reserves each day.

3. Newton’s Third Law of Motion

“Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”

or

“What goes up must come down.”

In the 1980s, Professor Richard Solomon put forward the Opponent-process theory of emotions, which suggested that when we experience one emotion, we’re bound to experience the direct opposite of that emotion shortly after.

This theory has unknowingly become integrated into the terminology used in those with drug addictions over the years, as what’s known as a “comedown” whereby the user experiences extremely low periods after their drug-induced high wears off, much lower than their original baseline level of happiness.

Non-drug users unknowingly experience a similar “comedown” in our their own everyday lives (albeit to a much lesser extent).

Be that after an especially W-I-L-D night out or after celebrating a big win in life, Solomon’s theory suggests that after such a period of extra-ordinary elation your brain seeks to return to baseline by moving well below its original level of happiness to recalibrate.

Think of it as the story of Goldilocks except that the third and final bowl of porridge, which was “just right” was missing and so it forced her to mix the two extremes instead to strike that happy medium.

This theory works in the opposite direction as well.

Think of the first time you rode a rollercoaster. Your initial moments of sheer terror are quickly replaced by exhilaration once you step off — hell, you might even want to go again! Or after an extended period of feeling low, you might notice that you laugh the loudest in a group when a friend makes a silly joke.

By simply gaining an awareness of this phenomenon, I hope you bolster your own levels of emotional intelligence so that you are better prepared to navigate a period of the blues following bliss.

And when that feeling of the blues does come, you’ll remember the wise words of your good ol’ pal whose name you can neither pronounce, nor spell, Poiseuille.

Final Thoughts

Will these three laws lead to a complete transformation in how you perceive reality as you know it? Probably not. You might need to delve into some quantum physics textbooks for those…

But hopefully the easy to remember and somewhat unique format of these laws will stick with you and provide actionable guidance on how you can be more productive, resilient and emotionally intelligent.