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In a world where sports are dominated by youth and speed, some athletes in their late 30s and even 40s are not just keeping upthey are thriving. Novak Djokovic is still outlasting opponents nearly half his age on tenniss biggest stages. LeBron James continues to dictate the pace of NBA games, defending centers and orchestrating plays like a point guard. Allyson Felix won her 11th Olympic medal in track and field at age 35. And Tom Brady won a Super Bowl at 43, long after most NFL quarterbacks retire. The sustained excellence of these athletes is not just due to talent or gritits biology in action. Staying at the top of their game reflects a trainable convergence of brain, body, and mindset. Im a performance scientist and a physical therapist who has spent over two decades studying how athletes train, taper, recover, and stay sharp. These insights arent just for high-level athletesthey hold true for anyone navigating big life changes or working to stay healthy. Increasingly, research shows that the systems that support high performancefrom motor control to stress regulation to recoveryare not fixed traits but trainable capacities. In a world of accelerating change and disruption, the ability to adapt to new changes may be the most important skill of all. So, what makes this adaptability possiblebiologically, cognitively, and emotionally? The amygdala and prefrontal cortex Neuroscience research shows that with repeated exposure to high-stakes situations, the brain begins to adapt. The prefrontal cortexthe region most responsible for planning, focus, and decision-makingbecomes more efficient in managing attention and making decisions, even under pressure. During stressful situations, such as facing match point in a Grand Slam final, this area of the brain can help an athlete stay composed and make smart choicesbut only if its well trained. In contrast, the amygdala, our brains threat detector, can hijack performance by triggering panic, freezing motor responses, or fueling reckless decisions. With repeated exposure to high-stakes moments, elite athletes gradually reshape this brain circuit. They learn to tune down amygdala reactivity and keep the prefrontal cortex online, even when the pressure spikes. This refined brain circuitry enables experienced performers to maintain their emotional control. Creating a brain-body loop Brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, is a molecule that supports adapting to changes quickly. Think of it as fertilizer for the brain. It enhances neuroplasticity: the brains ability to rewire itself through experience and repetition. This rewiring helps athletes build and reinforce the patterns of connections between brain cells to control their emotion, manage their attention, and move with precision. BDNF levels increase with intense physical activity, mental focus, and deliberate practice, especially when combined with recovery strategies such as sleep and deep breathing. Elevated BDNF levels are linked to better resilience against stress and may support faster motor learning, which is the process of developing or refining movement patterns. For example, after losing a set, Djokovic often resets by taking deep, slow breathsnot just to calm his nerves, but to pause and regain control. This conscious breathing helps him restore focus and likely quiets the stress signals in his brain. In moments like these, higher BDNF availability likely allows him to regulate his emotions and recalibrate his motor response, helping him to return to peak performance faster than his opponent. Rewiring your brain In essence, athletes who repeatedly train and compete in pressure-filled environments are rewiring their brain to respond more effectively to those demands. This rewiring, from repeated exposures, helps boost BDNF levels and in turn keeps the prefrontal cortex sharp and dials down the amygdalas tendency to overreact. This kind of biological tuning is what scientists call cognitive reserve and allostasisthe process the body uses to make changes in response to stress or environmental demands to remain stable. It helps the brain and body be flexible, not fragile. Importantly, this adaptation isnt exclusive to elite athletes. Studies on adults of all ages show that regular physical activityparticularly exercises that challenge both body and mindcan raise BDNF levels, improve the brains ability to adapt and respond to new challenges, and reduce stress reactivity. Programs that combine aerobic movement with coordination tasks, such as dancing, complex drills, or even fast-paced walking while problem-solving have been shown to preserve skills such as focus, planning, impulse control, and emotional regulation over time. After an intense training session or a match, you will often see athletes hopping on a bike or spending some time in the pool. These low-impact, gentle movements, known as active recovery, help tone down the nervous system gradually. Outside of active recovery, sleep is where the real reset and repair happen. Sleep aids in learning and strengthens the neural connections challenged during training and competition. Over time, this convergence creates a trainable loop between the brain and body that is better equipped to adapt, recover, and perform. Lessons beyond sport While the spotlight may shine on sporting arenas, you dont need to be a pro athlete to train these same skills. The ability to perform under pressure is a result of continuing adaptation. Whether youre navigating a career pivot, caring for family members, or simply striving to stay mentally sharp as the world changes, the principles are the same: Expose yourself to challenges, regulate stress, and recover deliberately. While speed, agility, and power may decline with age, some sport-specific skills such as anticipation, decision-making, and strategic awareness actually improve. Athletes with years of experience develop faster mental models of how a play will unfold, which allows them to make better and faster choices with minimal effort. This efficiency is a result of years of reinforcing neural circuits that doesnt immediately vanish with age. This is one reason experienced athletes often excel even if they are well past their physical prime. Physical activity, especially dynamic and coordinated movement, boosts the brains capacity to adapt. So does learning new skills, practicing mindfulness, and even rehearsing performance under pressure. In daily life, this might be a surgeon practicing a critical procedure in simulation, a teacher preparing for a tricky parent meeting, or a speaker practicing a high-stakes presentation to stay calm and composed when it counts. These arent elite ritualstheyre accessible strategies for building resilience, motor efficiency, and emotional control. Humans are built to adaptwith the right strategies, you can sustain excellence at any stage of life. Fiddy Davis Jaihind Jothikaran is an associate professor of kinesiology at Hope College. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
Work emails ping as they come in. A text reminder flashes: Empty bottles are needed for science class tomorrow. The dogs out of food. A soccer tournament just got moved to next weekend. The babysitter needs to get booked for Saturday. For millions of working parents, this isnt a chaotic momentits just Monday. The mental loadthe invisible, relentless work of managing a householdincludes anticipating, tracking, and executing everything from dentist appointments to birthday gifts to dinner plans. It is a full-time job embedded inside the rest of your life. Its no wonder that 48% of parents say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming. This burden also falls disproportionately on women. In dual-career households, its often female partners carrying the majority of the logistical load, causing anxiety, depression, and burnout. As the founder of Jam, a company building tools to reduce this mental load on families, Ive interviewed hundreds of working parentsexecutives, teachers, writers, designersabout how they manage the logistics of their lives. (Spoiler: No one is as put together as they look from the outside.) As a result, Ive also had the opportunity to see what behaviors and systems actually do work in lessening stress and chaos, as well as one very common trap that almost always makes things worse. With the new school year underway, now is the perfect time for a reset. Here are five proven strategies to lighten the load. 1. Implement the Sunday Sync This small weekly habit packs a huge punch. A Sunday Sync is a 1530 minute meeting to review the week ahead: scheduling, to-dos, grocery needs, childcare coverage. Did that work dinner make it onto the calendar? Whos handling pickup on Wednesday? A good Sync covers both granular and high-level planning: the upcoming week and a peek at the month ahead. In families with school-age kids, everyone can be includedand should be. There are a few easily realized benefits to a family Sunday Sync. First, it mitigates the friction before it starts. (Its easier to find a ride for someone three days in advance as opposed to realizing it the morning of.) Second, it allows everyone in the family to get on the same page for the weekwhich lessens the mental burden on parents to carry it all themselves. 2. Create a Single Digital Information Hub Families today juggle school portals, team apps, shared calendars, and never-ending group text chains. Instead of glancing at one calendar, youre scouring texts, emails, and crumpled flyers in the bottom of a backpack just to find out where and when the basketball tryouts are this week. The one not-so-great habit we saw consistently in almost every family? Attempting to coordinate everything through text with a partner. Grocery lists, pickup reminders, PDFs, and permission slips all buried alongside memes and whats for dinner? messages is a recipe for stressthings inevitably falling through the cracks. Text is great for quick check-ins. But its not a planning tool. Important information gets lost, one partner ends up doing the heavy lifting, and the mental load creeps back in. Instead, rely on your shared hub and review it during your Sunday Sync. Save texting for the cute kids pics. Thriving families tend to use one centralized place for all essential info: schedules, school events, to-dos, contacts and carpools. This hub should sync with all other calendars, house shared to-dos and shopping lists, and allow access for kids or caregivers with appropriate permissions. Bonus points if it easily allows families to tag who is going to events and who is driving, as well as having AI-powered features to ease the burden of scheduling. It might be a shared calendar or even a shared family Notion hub, but the key is that all adults have equal access to it so that one person doesnt have to be the default manager of the family. (And yes, your hub must be digital so changes can be made and synced on the fly, and no, texting does not count as a hub.) 3. Reduce Decisions, Increase Traditions Decision fatigue is real, and the micro-decisions of parenting can really add up fast: Whats for dinner? What gift to get for the birthday party? What can the kids wear for the spirit day next week? The more of these you have to make, the heavier your mental load. One easy way to reduce decisions each week is to increase routines. Think, pizza Fridays, a treat you make for every birthday, or a habit like Chores & Chill Sunday afternoons. Having a few stockpiles can help as well, like a default list of go-to gifts you keep in the house (board games are a personal favorite) or a spirit day/costume bin with items that can be drawn from and repurposed all year long. In our house, Taco Tuesday started as a shortcut on a day full of commitments, but it’s now a beloved family tradition! It may sound rigid in theory, but routines actually create breathing room. Kids thrive with predictability, and so do overwhelmed adults. 4. Automate What You Can No need to reinvent the wheelmany weekly purchases can actually be automated. Get a working list of grocery staples and put it on auto-ship each week. Yes, youll likely still have to go to the store, but youll be purchasing less and saving time. Families also often do this with cleaning supplies, pet food, vitamins, and supplements (and usually get better prices as a result, too). This works for chores and tasks as well: Recurring chores like a weekly dry-cleaning or monthly dog grooming can be set to the same day and time. Having a standing date night with a regular babysitter cuts down on logistics. Even switching prescriptions to a pharmacy that offers free auto-delivery can save precious time and energy. Often these errands or purchases feel small on their own, however automation reduces both the anticipation and execution time, as well as mitigating mishaps, which can lead to more serious time savings while also reducing energy expended on tedious tasks. 5. Delegate (Including to AI) The mental load is heaviest when its invisible and unshared. It can be hard to surrender control, but its essential to avoid burnout. Delegating and sharing works best when everyone gravitates toward the tasks that suit their skill sets. Simple household chores can also be assigned to school-age kids in the family. At first this may feel like extra work, but it will pay dividends quickly, both in time saved and increased responsibility and confidence. Also consider where you can outsource some work, such as meal prep delivery, booking virtual assistant hours, or caregiving help. (Try selecting one thing to outsource and see how it impacts your mental load and time. If its worth it, continue it, and consider adding more.) Finally, parents are increasingly using AI to save time at home. Its great at things like creating a birthday-party plan or putting together sample itineraries or packing lists for your familys upcoming road trip. At Jam we created an AI Assistant feature that reads whoe emails (like school newsletters) and pops all the events onto the calendar for you, while apps like Ollie use AI to create meal plans and grocery lists for families. Find Systems That Work For You These strategies arent about striving for perfection. A little planning up fronta sync, a shared hub, an auto-ship ordercan save hours of scrambling later, so you do have the time and bandwidth for the things you actually enjoy doing, or at least a few moments of quality time. The mental load may not disappear, but it doesnt have to rule your life. Remember that a few small efforts now can create big relief later. Thats the kind of ROI every parent needs.
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E-Commerce
As the AI era accelerates, some leaders have predicted a wipeout for entry-level white-collar jobs. I understand these concerns as unemployment rates rise for U.S. college graduates. But cutting early-in-career (EIC) talent isnt a transformation strategy. Its the start of a slow-motion collapse. AI is fundamentally changing how we work. People will increasingly oversee more AI agents, changing the way we think about teams. Business leaders must shape whats nextnot shrink from it. From job elimination to job evolution EIC employees are AI natives who are already leading the transformation. They intuitively engage with tech, bring creative agility, and have the curiosity needed to thrive in fast-changing environments. According to the World Economic Forum, job loss between 2025 and 2030 will be more than offset by new roles, leading to a net gain of 78 million jobs. As some roles and tasks phase out, new ones emerge that require skills like AI and data fluency, creative thinking, resilience, and curiosity. If we dont protect and modernize the EIC pipeline, we risk widening the skill gaps and stalling the impact and ROI of AI solutions. EIC talent will be tomorrows leaders, so we need to build pathways for them today. The demographic and leadership imperatives The talent pipeline is narrowing just as the pace of transformation is accelerating. U.S. birth rates are declining. Fewer 18-year-olds are entering the workforce. Higher education costs are skyrocketing, and many high school graduates are choosing two-year and technical degrees or trade jobs. That makes every EIC hire even more valuable. HR leaders help define the structure of the workforce and manage payrollthe largest line on the profit and loss statementso where we invest matters. EIC roles are often the smartest entry point for workforce planning. We need to build AI-first cultures rooted in continuous learning, with roles that fuel business and personal growth. That means doubling down on equipping early-career talent with the skills, creativity, and adaptability to lead AI-powered organizations. And our succession pipelines must prioritize leadership capabilities like AI fluency, orchestration, and human-centered change management. That means focusing on these key steps: Reimagine strategic workforce planning As leaders, we must identify the skills AI wont replace and the skills that matter most to our businessesfrom programming and UX design to collaboration, creative problem solving, and empathy. Then we should map those skills to evolving roles. For example, if AI handles research, an entry-level role could evolve into a prompt engineer or curator. Other future roles could include AI safety and ethics coordinators and AI agent trainers for front line workers. Design new rotations and exposure Companies that invest in internships build future-ready talent pipelines. Internships today are table stakes. To stand out, we need to build rotational programs, apprenticeships, and real-world experiences that give EIC hires exposure across the business. Reverse mentoring, for example, could give EIC talent a chance to connect directly with senior leaders, while giving those leaders a window into AI-native thinking. The goal is to retain top talent by creating a culture of growth, mobility, and connection. With clear goals, meaningful work, strong managers, and real learning experiences, EIC talent has the chance to thrive and drive innovation. At ServiceNow, 95.6% of our interns accepted our full-time offers in 2024, proof of meaningful investment. Embrace AI-first learning for growth and retention Retaining top talent, especially early-in-career talent, starts with listening followed by meaningful action. Sixty-five percent of EIC workers say theyd stay at least four years at a company if it offered robust development opportunities. We need to show EIC talent how they can grow, and design learning that matches their curiosity. EIC employees expect learning to be personalized, bite-sized, and built into the workflow. Thats why we launched ServiceNow Universityto train our employees and the broader technology ecosystem. Its working: EIC hires at ServiceNow have a 7% lower attrition rate in their first two years than their peers. The long game: Invest in young talent and AI Leaders dont need to decide between cutting costs and investing in the future. They can do both when they focus on transforming the workforce. Organizations that lead with intentionthose that rethink roles, invest in AI enablement, and reimagine EIC talentwill attract the best minds and shape the next era of innovation. We all have a lot to learn in this new world, and we should evolve our strategies as we go. But EIC employees are essential. Their fluency with technology, drive to learn, and creative edge are exactly what we need to build the future. We cant afford to sideline them. Committing to EIC talent will require a lot of hard work and vision, but with the right strategy, it is possible. Jacqui Canney is chief people and AI enablement officer at ServiceNow.
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E-Commerce
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