Feel Good with Lean

We are pleased to present this guest blog post by Lisa Hitch, Business Manager and Technical Communications Specialist, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Michigan Technological University.

Our internal “Reward System” is a collection of brain structures that regulate our behavior by making us feel good when we achieve a goal. Everything necessary for the survival of our species–eating, mating, sleeping, and physical perseverance–is rewarded by a neurochemical called dopamine that makes us feel good. And the drive to feel good wins out over avoiding pain in most cases.

The problem is that we have evolved to the point that we are able to survive without our internal reward system. For example, we can just stop by a fast food drive-through on our way home from work to get our dinner–no big victory there. An inactive internal reward system can cause minor side effects such as procrastination, lack of organization, and missed deadlines. Moreover, low dopamine levels can also lead to serious conditions such as depression, attention deficits, anxiety, fatigue, poor concentration, and more.

Neuroscientific research shows that higher levels of dopamine might support the internal drive some people have to persevere while lower dopamine levels may cause others to give up. But dopamine can be harnessed and used as a prime motivating force to help us keep pushing and achieving our goals. The use of Lean tools and methods can actually help to create feel-good habits that increase our natural ability to produce dopamine.

Lean tools and methods help us to visualize our work, break tasks down to manageable pieces, stay focused, and–here’s the big one–finish our tasks, which rings the bell for our internal reward system. One such Lean tool is the Personal Kanban.

This image shows the basic concept of a Personal Kanban. Tasks are broken down and categorized into milestones or phases, such as “things to do,” “work in progress,” “waiting,” and “done.” Color-coded sticky notes help to separate the tasks between types of work we need to manage, “administrative,” “communications,” and “HR,” for example. The sticky notes can also be of different shapes and sizes to indicate levels of importance or flow of work. In any case, the movement of the task through the system and into the “done” column reinforces our internal reward system.

There are many other Lean tools and methods that can be found on Michigan Tech’s Continuous Improvement website. I encourage you to check them out and start rewarding yourself today!

Sources:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201112/the-neuroscience-perseverance

http://mentalhealthdaily.com/2015/04/02/low-dopamine-levels-symptoms-adverse-reactions