Willpower, good memory, unwavering motivation, and psychological resilience are traits we tend to regard as stable and attribute to character. Yet from the perspective of neurobiology, they are the result of the brain’s biochemical balance. A balance that can be shaped.
Sunny Saturday morning. The heat is softened by a fresh ocean breeze, Table Mountain, as is its habit, has wrapped itself in clouds. We gather at Expand Health, South Africa’s first holistic longevity hub, where the air smells of sandalwood and quiet ambition. Sharp light floods the space through huge windows and fiddle-leaf figs. Somewhere in the background, a hyperbaric chamber and red-light panels wait for someone to climb in and become a better version of themselves.
It’s 9 am but no one looks like they’ve just rolled out of bed. If anything, there’s a suspicion that most people here have already been up for hours for their morning routines. We’re a mixed crowd of young people of different ages, who want to perform better, think sharper, and get more out of ourselves. And we are curious.
We’re here to listen to Friederike Fabritius, German neuroscientist and bestselling author who has spent her career studying how the brain works, to perform and live better. We do not come for quick tips or life hacks, we want to hear a researcher who, in clear and accessible language, explains real neurological mechanics behind focus, decision-making and peak performance.
She sits down with Jack Harland, co-founder of Expand Health, engineer and constructor, passionate about longevity, psychological power of embracing discomfort and motocross. He starts with an anecdote about Friederike and VO2max. Of course.
Prophet VO2max
VO2max might be the most honest indicator of physical fitness and predictor of longevity. It is the body’s maximum capacity to utilize oxygen during very intense exercise (the more efficiently the heart pumps blood, the lungs deliver oxygen, and the muscles use it to produce energy, the higher the score). It’s measured during a graded exercise test typically done on a treadmill or stationary bike, with the person wearing a mask that analyses the composition of inhaled and exhaled air, exercising at increasing intensity. For most people the test lasts around eight minutes and ends when the body says “no.” The thing is that our mind is faster than our body. Most people give up before they reach their physiological maximum. We know we have reached maximum (VO2max) when oxygen uptake stops rising despite increasing effort. For most of us, that moment never comes, because we stop too soon.
One day Friederike walked into Expand Health just like any other patient, Jack had no idea who she was. He fitted the mask, started the protocol and watched the data. After the standard eight minutes she not only reached her maximum, she held it for another four minutes. That last sentence may sound modest, but it’s remarkable. Reaching physiological maximum requires something most of us lack – the ability to ignore every signal screaming at you to stop. Holding it for four minutes is a different league entirely.
We give up earlier because the brain is wired for survival, not performance. As effort increases, the body sends distress signals: burning muscles, rising heart rate, pain. The brain interprets these as danger and triggers the urge to stop, long before the body has hit its limit. It’s a protection mechanism. To prevent potential damage to the heart, muscles or organs, our brains make us think that we are at our maximum, when we’re actually not. This is why elite athletes train not just their bodies but their tolerance for discomfort. They’re essentially teaching the brain to move that self-imposed safety margin a little further each time. That makes Friederike’s four minutes even more striking. She didn’t just push through the discomfort, she stayed there.
I like that introduction. For a scientist who studies human performance for a living, it is a quality guarantee. We can trust her.
Biology of the brain
Fabritius is a neuroscientist, and that is the key to understanding her approach. For her, performance is not a matter of motivation, willpower or the right mindset. It is about the biochemical processes of the brain — the organ that manages thoughts, decisions, creativity and focus, and that co‑creates our emotional life.
The prefrontal cortex, the most modern and human part of our brains, is the seat of planning, reasoning, and long-term thinking. It is also why, unlike our beloved dogs, we find it so difficult to live in the present moment. The same structure that allows us to imagine the future also makes us replay the past. Planning and rumination are two sides of the same coin.
When emotions are unregulated, when you are in chronic stress, anxiety, or simply stuck in your own head your brain quite literally works differently. Worse. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for your clearest thinking, loses ground to the limbic system: fast, instinctive, but not particularly sophisticated. The organism shifts into survival mode and our reactions become more impulsive.
For Fabritius, emotions and performance are not separate domains that occasionally influence each other. They share the same neurological substrate. You cannot optimize one while ignoring the other, not because it is philosophically unsound, but because the brain simply does not work that way.
Standard Brain does not exist
Every brain and body arrives differently, with different receptors, different responses to stress, different thresholds. This is not a minor variation. It is a fundamental difference in how people are wired. Resilience, Fabritius says, is roughly 50% nature and 50% nurture. The practical implication is significant: there is no single standard for how a person should perform, focus, or respond to pressure. Understanding your own brain, how it works, not how someone thinks it should, is not self-leniency. It is the starting point for genuine performance.
FFF
The optimal mental state for peak performance, Fabritius claims, is—of course—a neurochemical one, and it depends on three molecules getting the balance right. She calls the framework FFF: Fun, Fear, Focus. Dopamine, the molecule of motivation, brings fun. Noradrenaline, which brings fear, is the stress hormone that kicks the body into gear. And acetylcholine, the quiet one, holds focus steady. Too little dopamine and you are bored. Boredom is not just unpleasant, Fabritius is clear that it is actively detrimental to the brain. Too much noradrenaline, too much pressure, and performance suffers too. The brain cannot function well at either extreme. The sweet spot is being just past comfortable. Slightly over-challenged. It is impossible, she says, to reach your peak performance without fun, without that dopamine flowing. And equally impossible if you are overwhelmed by stress.
The Dopamine Trap
Most of us believe we are reasonably good at multitasking. Fabritius would like us to reconsider. When we switch rapidly between tasks, checking messages while writing, watching news while doing taxes, we experience small dopamine hits with each switch. The novelty feels rewarding. It feels productive. And this is the trap.
IQ drops by approximately ten points during multitasking. We are not doing two things at once. We are doing two things badly in quick succession, and experiencing a neurochemical reward for it.
There is a subtler consequence too. When we switch tasks, we form fewer memories. Fabritius connects this to something most people have felt: the sensation that time is accelerating. We remember time through memories. Fewer memories, shorter perceived time. A life lived in constant distraction is a life that will feel, at the end, like it went very fast. Time is our most precious asset. Multitasking doesn’t save it, it steals it.
What the Brain Actually Remembers
The brain is selective by design. The question is what it chooses to keep, and why. For memory sleep matters, exercise matters too. But the main factor for Fabritius is emotional connection: if we care, if something is truly important to us, we remember it. Emotional significance is one of the primary signals the brain uses to decide what deserves long-term storage.
We remember what we care about. The implication is straightforward: information without emotional connection is far less likely to stick. We do not learn best when we are neutral. We learn best when we are engaged.
How to change a habit
If you want to change a habit, do not rely on willpower, Fabritius says. Build a system instead, one that does not require you to summon it. New habits need dopamine. They need a reward attached, something the brain can recognize as worth repeating. And they need something to look forward to—anticipatory joy, even before the activity begins. Without that reward signal, the behavior does not stick. You can pair running with your favourite podcast, or a daily quarter-hour of language learning with a good coffee.
Breaking bad habits requires a different approach than most people take. Most reach for the prefrontal cortex, trying to suppress the urge through sheer effort. Fabritius flips the question: what could you do instead? The brain responds poorly to negatives. Rather than fighting to stop something, focus on what you will do in its place. Replace watching series in the evening with a book. Dumn scrolling with a notebook and a ritual of writing your thoughts down. Don’t suppress, redirect.
Free Will and What the Brain Will Believe
On free will, Fabritius is disarmingly honest: she doesn’t know, because science doesn’t know. We may never know. But even if free will is not real, believing in it produces better outcomes. We have some autonomy, some agency, and acting as though our choices matter is, itself, a choice worth making.
On manifestation, she is careful. It can work, but only if you genuinely believe what you are telling yourself. If you repeat something your brain recognizes as false, it does not inspire. It creates internal conflict. Do not lie to your brain, she says. You have to believe what you say, otherwise the brain suffers. If you consider yourself unattractive and dislike your reflection in the mirror, repeating in front of that mirror that you are beautiful will only torment your brain.
Sleep Is Not a Lifestyle Choice
If there is one thing she is blunt about, it’s a sleep. She has designed her life around sleep. Not optimized for it, not tried to fit it in, simply designed around it.
While we sleep, the brain clears out toxins. That is the sleep’s first function. The second is memory consolidation: the hippocampus acts as an editor, deciding what moves from short-term into long-term memory and what gets deleted. Learning something and then sleeping on it is not a metaphor. It is a maintenance mechanism. The brain washes itself clean at night.
She is skeptical of nootropics. Not because they do nothing, but because our own physiological mechanisms work better. Rather than chemically stimulating the brain, she prefers to activate its own regulatory systems. Sleep and cold exposure are her tools. Even brief contact with cold—stepping outside in winter, a cold shower—stimulates the nervous system, raises alertness and improves mood. The body responds to cold with a release of neurotransmitters associated with energy and focus, which is why a few minutes of it bring a sense of mental clarity and a surge of vitality. Elevating performance through chemistry, she suggests, is a shortcut that tends to underperform the real thing.
Mindfulness Without the Raisin
Fabritius is not against mindfulness, but she is against boredom. And some mindfulness practices, she admits, are simply boring. She mentions raisin-tasting, the classic Buddhist exercise of spending several minutes with a single raisin, noticing its texture, smell, weight. It does not work for everyone.
Her point is that presence does not require a tedious method. You can be fully present while playing with your children, cooking, exercising your muscles, feeling sand under your feet at the beach. Find something you love and focus on that. The activity is irrelevant. What matters is that your attention is fully there. Full presence does not have to be meditation technique. It is a decision about where you put your mind.
Living the science
Friederike Fabritius does not just study these things. She lives them. She removes things she does not want. Stimuli, noise, people. She is mindful of who and what she allows near her. She always has a book with her, because she knows that if she doesn’t, she picks up her phone and gets frustrated by the news. She is not beyond the pull of distraction. She has simply arranged her environment so that better options are always within reach.
Before I leave, I ask Friederike how she herself puts all of this into practice. She answers without hesitation – that’s a short list: sleep, exercise, people around you who genuinely matter, whose presence adds to her life rather than subtracts from it. As she says the last one, she gestures toward a group of five smiling children around her. They had been in the room for the entire talk. I am not sure whether they were listening to their mother or quietly absorbed in their own world, but for two hours, they had not required anyone’s attention.
And now I trust her even more.
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