Neuroscientist's Guide To 10X Your Focus & Memory | Dr Sahar Yousef | FO559 Raj Shamani

30:53You just start cutting everything off. You're like, and then I'm going to get in my pajamas. Okay, now we're even one step closer. You just have to figure out what behaviors that you want to design out, commit to it, make it as small as possible, but really make the when part, the if part, the beginning, the situation should be as clear as humanly possible. Truly clear. People really skip this step. They say things like, I'll give you an example of when people want to stop doing something because it's possible your viewers want to cut a habit. Yeah. Stop smoking, stop eating sweets, whatever it may be.

31:30Start binging on their reels overnight. Tricky one, but yeah, totally, totally. You could say, when I have a craving for another piece of chocolate, when I have a craving for a cigarette, then I will do this instead. And I'll tell you, this is a version of an implementation intention for a negative behavior, meaning a behavior you want to cut. Not a positive behavior, a behavior you want to add. Say add like positive and negative, right? Add a behavior or remove a behavior. Removing a behavior is insanely difficult. Super, super difficult. Way more than adding. Yes. Why cutting off a habit is more difficult than making a new habit?

32:18Do you have a whiteboard? Yeah. All right, all right. Okay. Okay, so we were talking about neural networks before, right? Yeah. So neural networks, again, are patterns of electrical activation. Okay. So let's say, for example, you have some pattern of electrical activation here in the brain. And let's say this represents your craving for something you don't want to crave anymore. Yeah, watching reels, like binge watching random stuff. Oh, wow. Binge watching. Okay. Mindless scrolling, whatever you want to call it. Great. I'll even draw a little phone, you know. Okay. There you go. Okay. All right.

32:57So this is the craving for it though. Okay. This is not the behavior. This is the craving. So if this dot here represents the actual craving for it, what that let's say ends up getting connected to is a set of patterns of electrical activation here that represents the complex behavior that ends up being you grab the phone and you start screaming. rolling. Okay. Okay. So it starts with a craving. The craving is not, by the way, usually to binge watch. Usually the craving is something else. Usually, and this is where we can get a little more emotional here. It's a feeling. Okay. What do you mean by that?

33:40Well, let's see. So craving is not for binge watching. Well, that ends up becoming the behavior for you to satisfy a craving. The craving you think is actually for binge watching, but it's a craving to binge watch in order to satisfy some feeling. That's usually what's happening. Like something I'm missing. Something you're missing or something that you want to disassociate from, numb from. Usually, usually the feeling that people have is overwhelm stress let's say if you're overwhelmed you're stressed out you're tired you lack motivation right you're looking to solve for these feelings and your brain has decided a nice thing to do if you have these feelings you're like i don't nobody wants to feel this by the way right these are bad feelings so if you have these feelings your brain goes let's get out of this how do i solve this there's a few different things you can do but let's say you accidentally develop this addiction this habit because by the way the word habit is a common one we're all interested in habits yeah it's pretty much the same thing as addiction it's the same thing people hear the word addiction and they think it's like scary like it's some moral you know yeah it's a bad thing it's a bad thing what about when people are addicted to exercise or addicted to feeling healthy or addicted to being kind right because you can you've i've met people who definitely are addicted to those things And I know you probably have met lots of these kinds of people because these are the people you collect.

35:38People addicted to their own success. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. So it's not a bad thing. Addiction just means habit. That's it. Okay. So we can demystify, dethrone, you know, these words. Really, they're coupled together. They're the same thing. They're the same thing. So what is a habit? it was also an addiction, it's also the same thing as just a behavior that you do over and over. I would just say that you do a lot, right? So what ends up happening is you have a feeling, there is some brain state, some cognitive or emotional brain state. And then what ends up happening is you want to move away from that feeling.

36:25If it's a bad feeling like this, right? You want to move away from it. Your brain wants to help you solve it. It doesn't want to let you sit in that bad feeling. So whatever it is that you did, let's say you did binge watching one time when you felt that way. You're like, let me distract myself, you know, go somewhere else. We don't need to think that. We don't need to feel that. So then you start binge watching. And what's going to happen in the beginning? In the beginning, you're distracted, right? So it feels good. Yeah. Okay. So what you ended up doing is you ended up doing the actual binge watching.

36:55So you scrolled. And then what happens at the very end? Let's say now you're done scrolling and you put the phone away. This is a bit of a trick question. Because let's say you were overwhelmed about a work deadline. And then you started binge watching for 45 minutes in the evening instead of working on the thing that's overwhelming you. So then you did the binge watching and then afterwards you put the phone down. Did you deal with the thing that you were actually stressed about? No, I get guilty. Yeah. So now you have this, you have the overwhelm and you have shame. Yeah. So the person is super sad now.

37:34We're just super sad. So now that you have overwhelm and shame, you know, that's even worse than before. No? Yeah. So guess what I want to do again? Watch again. Then go around the circle again. So, okay, let's say you've done this one night. But come on, let's be honest. I've done this even like at least 100 times. Do you know what I mean? Here's the answer to your original question. Every single time you do this, you go through this path. Every time you traverse this road and you do it again and again and again. Do you see what's happening here? We're making it darker, no? We're making it maybe even bigger.

38:15stronger, deeper, this neural network starts to become like a tree trunk, like the roots of a tree. That is how a behavior, if you do it one time, that's fine. You do it 100 times, 1 ,000 times, a million times, that's a behavior that you do a lot. That's the same thing as addiction. It's the same thing as a habit. It's all the same. So habits, addictions, and behaviors that you do a lot are just really entrenched and strong associations between a feeling, a craving and a behavior. So how do we break this? One, tip number one, don't wait for it to get so strong. You know, ideally it's so strong already.

39:04Okay. Let's assume it's because I'm sure there must be hundreds of bad behaviors, which are strong in my head. Obviously hundreds of good behaviors as well. Yes. But the bad behaviors, let's talk about them. Let's get rid of them first. Okay. Step one, awareness. You have to understand and see the loop for yourself. You cannot change something that you do not understand, that you don't have data on. Right? You have to understand a system if you want to change the system. So you need knowledge, self-knowledge in this case so you need to be aware you need to be able to see your own behavior as it's happening that means you actually have to answer the question what's the feeling so step one is you got to identify the emotions and the feelings that cause you to go down the loop in the first place how do i identify this because i don't know if i'm if i'm falling into this trap of feeling like I want to crave something.

40:06That craving can be dessert at midnight. It can be binge watching. It can be just doing all sorts of bad habits. For some people, it can be alcohol, smoking weed, smoking like a cigarette. For a lot of young people, it can be porn. All of these behaviors are stemmed from feeling, right? Yes. but we don't know why are they occurring yeah like it it can be overwhelmed it can be stress it can be insight it can be tired it can be all it can be just pure shame or maybe lack of ability to turn around my life or the feeling like a victim how do i find out which one is it you have to have what's called a cognitive pause so that means when you before you go grab the chocolate at midnight before you grab the phone and maybe you've already grabbed it by the way you just you've grabbed the phone you've opened up instagram whatever it is that your app of choice you know you grabbed it you opened it and you just were about to start scrolling and you go you have to start to build the awareness you go hold on hold on hold on i'm not saying you can't have it by the way in the beginning we just want to know why so you go okay hold on what am i feeling right now what is it that why do i want to go and binge watch right now i'm just exhausted like just okay so you're you're tired i would still ask you go deeper why are you exhausted and then i'd force you if i were in the room with you i would say well raj if you're exhausted shouldn't you go do something else like rest right or gain more energy do something that gives you energy like right if you're tired if it depends if it's right before bed then if you're tired yeah that's right go to bed sleep so then you go to sleep right we go we help you with the sleep thing but if you're tired in the middle of the day you're like halfway in the middle of the day and you're like i'm just exhausted and i need a break yeah this is not a break there was by the way a paper published in nature what is the world's like premier science journal 2024 that actually measured the effectiveness of different kinds of breaks okay one option was no break at all you do no break raj keep working tired so what keep going hustle come on you're young you got it let's go the next option was you take a break uh and you look outside or you go we'll take a walk outside in nature okay so you're exposed to something natural okay the next break was scrolling yeah can you imagine what the results were it showed that scrolling is pretty much the same as not taking a break so instead of actually letting this brain rest and make energy for you because again this is all chemistry up in here this is like again biological laws you need to learn that if this system is tired in the end, listen, I'm a high performance, but I'm all about productivity and performance.

43:19So if let's say, for example, treat yourself like an Olympic athlete, if an athlete is telling you I'm exhausted, right? Then you say, okay, okay, get off the field, go sit and rest, drink some water, get a snack. You know, we tell them to like stretch, you know, get ready. Why? Because I need you to go back out there and keep training. Yeah. If they say I'm tired, Like, let me open TikTok. That's we already know we science has already shown that that's not a break. It doesn't replenish and increase your energy. Right. So going back to this, I would you would say, oh, I'm tired. I would actually want you to sit down and really dig into the feeling more.

43:56You know, are you really is it just tired? What's really going on? And like then you need a replacement behavior. so in this previous example you were doing the scrolling it's this is what I meant by negative behavior right if you want to cut something off you cannot just say oh next time I'm exhausted I will not binge watch this is impossible good luck it won't happen it won't happen you're gonna do it because look at this look at how deep this network was it's not your choice it's gonna happen automatically. Raj is not driving this car. It's automatically just driving it on. It's automatically driving it.

44:38So you need to aggressively, that's what I meant, a cognitive pause. You need to aggressively start, number one, you need to start where it starts, which is the feeling. It starts here. The feeling, the brain state, the cognitive state, the craving. Why do you do the behavior in the first place? We have to cut it off there and make you pause and then say, okay we're gonna do something else so that ends up being this feeling right that was our first step yeah so instead of going towards the actual binge watching we're gonna do something else so let's say instead what's a healthy behavior that you wish you did more of too let's say breath work i mean yeah that would be nice yeah sure so you're gonna do breath work great okay like just one minute one minute is amazing 60 seconds close your eyes yeah that's it you don't have to do anything else you just that's it okay okay that's gonna be the new replacement behavior now here's what i would tell you if you're really addicted if after 60 seconds of closing your eyes you still want to scroll go for it makes it a lot easier no yeah but what you're doing when you do that, by the way, is let's say the closing your eyes.

45:53This is the feeling that started. This is the new behavior. Close your eyes, right? Draw a little eye for you here. Okay. So you close your eyes. This is the new behavior. Instead of this going immediately to the original scrolling behavior, it's going to go here first. This is you're breaking the cycle. instead of the energy going this way it's now going to go this way even if it goes this way afterwards we're helping maybe one time you go no i still want to scroll okay the second time maybe you're like okay fine really i'll do something else this is you just you have to find a way to break this thing and if i break this you're saying that after one minute if i still want to do it if i do this every time i'll reduce if you do it every time i promise you're going to start not doing it if you then you're just going to create a new one i mean listen if you do it every time then you're just going to start creating a new habit this way right yeah so you're just saying okay before the route was this way now this is a new route that i'm going to go to scrolling like now you're going to be that guy that before he binge watches he closes his legs for 60 seconds.

47:09You've just designed a new addiction. But the idea here is you're giving your brain an opportunity. It's just an opportunity to redirect. And what we call all of this, by the way, is to do one thing. And that thing is called emotional regulation. Interesting. That's what you're trying to do. Because every behavior, even people doing hard drugs, porn addiction. It's coming from an emotion. It starts here. If you can understand the emotion, you can control the behavior because you can choose it. You can design it. But that requires regulating. Regulating is hard. So what you can do is you just can create a cognitive pause and get yourself to do something tiny, easy, not hard, easy, easy, easy.

47:58And then you're creating a bit of a pattern interrupt. And it's an opportunity for you to choose something different. So then what ends up happening is this road becomes less traveled. Let's say this is after one month of you closing your eyes after the feeling instead of going immediately. So now it gets skinnier. After three months, it's even skinnier. Then this one, you've been doing this, right? So this is getting stronger and stronger. And this one keeps getting skinnier. And this one keeps getting stronger. That's the idea. This is how you build new habits and kill bad ones that you don't want anymore.

48:39And why killing bad ones is more difficult than building a new one? Starting new ones? It's difficult because you're both pruning. You're both pruning, meaning you're trying to deactivate and weaken a neural network or a pattern of electrical activation. And in order to do that, you should be building another one. So it's like you're doing two things, you know, if you think about it from like a business perspective, it's like, if you're trying to downsize one department and create a whole new department, it's a little easier just to say everyone else to keep going. We're also just going to build a new department, new project.

49:22So you're doing two things. Your pruning is hard because the energy wants to go that way because you let it, you let it go that way over and over and over again. And then it became that muscle became really strong. Going back to your identity. Remember those stories? Yeah. It's the same thing. So if you let yourself say, I'm a victim, I'm a victim, I'm a victim, I'm going to stay poor forever, blah, blah, blah, because the system is messed up. Those people who are successful, they, they were, you know, uh, they, they did it through tricks. they got it through luck i'm unlucky my family's not lucky my we just we don't that doesn't happen for us it doesn't happen for people from like where i'm from whatever it may be whatever story you're telling yourself any one of these stories if you let yourself say that story again what you're doing is again you're make you're just saying that's this is what's up this is real This is real.

50:17This is real. This is real. And what we said before, beliefs look for data and data informs beliefs. And then that cycle becomes even stronger and becomes your whole life. So when you get hired by these large companies to upgrade their mindset or upgrade mindset of their CEOs and their billionaires and multimillionaire executives, what actual habit or like a sort of a routine you help them build so that they don't get, they upgrade their mind and they don't get exhausted? because you must be improving something in their life. That's why they keep coming back to you. Yeah, there's a lot of habits and a lot of strategies.

51:06It kind of depends on, we can go through the list. Yeah, tell me the list. What can an average 25-year-old or 35-year-old who's watching this can follow in their life, which you teach the top executives? Okay, the first, and I would say the most pervasive issue that I see in most people's lives right now and in places of work as it relates to productivity is what we call bad digital hygiene. Okay. What do you mean by that? So hygiene, right? It's like having clean hands and things like this. Yeah. Bad digital hygiene is having a bad relationship with your digital tools and specifically your notifications.

51:53I'll give you an example you sit down to work you sit down to focus on something where is your phone when you're doing this usually it's on my desk like right here yeah like right now it's not here but mostly it's yeah it's right there actually for this I can actually we can do a mini experiment together if you're up for it okay I'm up for it okay Because there was a study done in UT Austin that I want to share with you. Okay. But we're going to pretend like you are doing, you're in the actual study itself. Okay. You're going to be like one of the participants. Okay. Okay. All right. So this is your phone.

52:36All right. So in this study, everybody came into the lab. So let's say you're in the exact same situation, right? You just come into the lab. And what we're going to do, Raj, is we're going to test your general fluid intelligence. Okay. What do you mean by that? It means your mind's ability to hold important information in mind and then get new information and compute with that information without losing the stuff that was already in your mind. Honestly, you've been doing it this whole conversation. You're amazing at it, but that's why you're successful. So it's an important skill. Have you noticed some people it's hard for them to do that?

53:13They like lose track of what they were trying to remember and they can't compute the stuff. Yeah. New stuff. Okay. So there's actually a test for this, which I bet you would score really high. Okay. Okay. It's a complex working memory task. And complex working memory is a phenomenal way to test for general fluid intelligence. Okay. I can give you this test later if you like, for real. But let's say you come into the lab and I want to test that. Okay. And I want to test your attention span. Okay. Okay. Oh. Now, you come in and I say, okay, you have a phone, right? All right, great. go ahead and turn your phone completely off like airplane or just no no no full like dead yeah not dnd not airplane mode the side and the button

54:04none okay it's off okay scenario one your phone is going to be in another room with me it's dead you turned it off you give it to me it's going to be in the waiting room so i'm going to hold it you're going to go into the testing room with a computer you're going to sit down and you're going to hammer out all these tests yeah we're going to test your intelligence and all these things okay option two scenario two i you can keep your phone but you have to put it in your pocket okay or a bag okay now imagine now you come in you sit down by yourself in the room and remember your phone is dead okay yeah you're not taking a text or something in the middle of the test you sit down you do the attention span test you do all the different tests scenario three you can take your phone out of your pocket but this time i let you put your phone face down just like where you said it was when you were working okay face down on the side then you're sitting in front of the computer and you're doing all of these assessments okay Okay.

55:10Yeah. Okay. In this study, and remember, the phone is dead. Yeah. Technically, nothing changes in all three scenarios. The phone's dead. You're not using it. Exactly. It's like having this eraser nearby, right? It's just an object. In this study, we were able to see, and by the way, this is one of the most shocking studies I think I have seen in the last number of years on this topic. Okay. When the phone was visible to you in your visual field, dead, but face down off to the side, scores were significantly decreased across the board. Like my attention decreased. Yes. It's the same you, right?

55:54Same Raj, same brain, different capability. And think about its attention span. Raj, it was also general fluid intelligence. That means you're dumber. literally if the phone is visible, I'm even though it's dead, even though it's dead, even though it's dead. This is the scary reality of how attention works in the brain. Remember the stories we tell, right? The brain is all about storytelling and narration. All the memories you have using that thing, all of the memories you have binge watching, talking to friends making plans good news bad news drama all these things are happening in the phone right for me like i don't know if you use like apple pay but i'm also like tapping it's like my payment system it's like everything it's everything everything is in the phone memories i have pictures you know of my dog like all this stuff is on there that i love right it's all there and you know that your brain knows that so if you can see it it's always going to be thinking oh I'm remembering all those amazing things and I want to play.

57:09Like right now, since the time we've spoken about phone, I've been anticipating. Really? Like a notification will come right now. But it's dead. It's dead. So here's my recommendation. You should have like a parking lot, a box, something there where you hide your phone. Just put it away so that you don't see it. Bam. Gone. Out of sight, out of mind. We don't need it. Right. And this is, listen, I'm not saying all the time, but when you want, when you want 100 % of your intelligence. For me, I run a business. I do research. I do all these different things. When it's game time, again, remember, treat yourself like an Olympic athlete.

57:49If it's game time, it's go time, you're making a big important decision, you're sitting down with your team and you're having a brainstorm, get the phones out of the room. because you're literally lowering the IQ of your whole team. If you let people have their phones out, the IQ of your employees, the IQ of your team is lower. You're making everybody dumber just by having phone here. Just by having the phone there. And if you care about this, people like you less. There's been lots of really interesting studies that people who hold their phone or put their phone out on the table when they're talking to people and they first meet you, you seem less trustworthy um less capable less intelligent all of these different things why would that be it's because i'm really saying listen you're not so important that i'm gonna give up the opportunity to put my attention somewhere else somebody more important than you might call me so i'm gonna keep it here in my hand you know because that's wherever it is usually it's people in people's hands or like you know some i'll like sometimes put it under my arm and carry it that way, you know, whatever.

58:55But it's on the table. Two people who have a coffee chat, right? They put it on the table and they sit down and they have their coffee. But it's literally lowering the quality of the conversation. It's lowering the quality of the connection. You know? You're not married yet, are you? No. Okay, so you're going to be dating. It's also going to lower the quality of your date. No, I don't take that on the rate. Good, good, good. All right, good, good, good. I've learned it on my podcast that days when I have my phone right next to me, Yeah. My attention during the conversation is much lower versus that's why I just always give it to these guys and just, you know, either out of the room or they have it somewhere.

59:34I don't even care. Yeah. And it's like on airplane mode. The moment you're like you entering before even you enter, like 30 minutes before you enter, it's just off. Like it's gone. I don't care. That's such a good habit. I'm so glad you mentioned that. Your listeners need to do that too. It's the same thing. It's the same exact thing. I would also recommend going back to your sleep because now I care about your sleep Remember I used to coach ceos and I know i'm like so i'm gonna start like coaching you Bring it back to your sleep. I would ask you to respect your sleep enough Because it's going to impact your performance that much too For you to put your phone away 30 minutes before bed Okay You said you did it 30 minutes before I arrived.

1:00:15Yeah, but this is it i'm not as important as your sleep Raj, your sleep is more important than me. I promise. I promise. Because if you start doing that, oh, you're going to see such a radical shift in your life and in your mindset. And do you want to know something? Okay, here's what I'm going to dare you to do this. Okay, and I'm going to follow up with you. I'm going to dare you to do this. 30 minutes before you go to bed, have a cutoff where you have to turn your phone off. And then don't turn it back on until 30 minutes after you wake up. if 30 minutes is too much, 15 minutes. 15 minutes before you go to bed off, and then after you wake up, just let your eyes open.

1:00:58Because people use the phone as an alarm. It's right next to them. The phone rings. They immediately grab it, and then they start. They're still in bed. They're like doing this. They're just like, oh. That's me. Thanks for attacking. Gotta talk about the truth. Yeah, I didn't know that. But this is the reality for so many people though, right? There's no point in the shame because the shame makes it worse. Remember? It's adding an extra feeling on top of the other feeling. So that feeling in the morning, you're looking for stimulation and it's FOMO. You want to figure out what you missed while you've been sleeping.

1:01:35Yeah. But here, okay, here's my, this is why I want you to not look at it for 15 minutes. First thing in the morning, your brain is in a very delicate and powerful state. you have an opportunity to reinforce those new beliefs that we were talking about. You have an opportunity to set your brain up for the right mindset, for the right goals, for the right priorities first thing in the morning. When you allow the rest of the world to tell you who you are, where you should be putting your attention. Say, hey, there's news over here. Look at this notification. Look at this email. I need this. Raj, I need you to send me this.

1:02:14Can I see you Tuesday at 3 p.m.? Please confirm. Is that when we're me? All this noise. All the noise from the outside is removing an opportunity for your own brain to tell you some amazing idea that's going to unlock something for you. Because so many people have such amazing clarity and amazing ideas first thing in the morning. But right now, across the world, I think it's a generation of people are losing that. Like we're missing out. We're missing out on so many things. So the first mistake you asked me, the biggest mistake that people are making is bad digital hygiene. They leave their notifications on on their computers.

1:02:55So they sit down on the computer. And now let's say we put the phones away at least, right? Phone is gone. Yeah. Because we learned about that. Okay. If you want to be fully focused, you want to have the best productivity, the highest level of effectiveness, you also need to make sure all your other forms of digital hygiene are locked in, dialed in. that means and let me be clear most of the ceos i work with when i sat down and i would observe them working you know i would show up with my clipboard and all of my you know observational tools and stuff and i'd be like go ahead just i'll be over here watching they have they immediately open a document right let's say they're getting ready for the board meeting or something they open up a document they're looking at a deck and then bing what was that okay and then they go here they have two monitors on the other monitor they have like slack open, constantly pinging, like all this stuff.

1:03:45And the phone is out and they have an Apple watch and they're just like doing this thing. And it's just like this. Yeah. But the brain is literally a focusing machine. Every single time you switch your attention, you pay for it. It's not free. What do you pay for it? How do you pay? What's the price? I'm glad you asked. You pay for it in time and you pay for it in energy. And if you don't believe me, we can test it out. Go ahead. Yeah? Tell me, yeah. Okay. Grab a piece of paper. You have some paper and a pen. So on this piece of paper, we're just going to draw two lines. There you go. Okay. Now on the top line, I want you to write, I am a great multitasker, but don't start yet.

1:04:30Okay. And then on the bottom line, I want you to write the numbers one through 20. One through 20. One through 20. I want you to go as fast as you can. Okay. And then I'm gonna time you. I'll hide the phone so that you're smart as possible. No excuses. Okay, right? I'm a great multitasker and 1 to 20. Exactly. Okay. And I want you to go as fast as you can. I'll read the times out out loud and then and then you can go for it. Okay. And then actually how about this? I won't read them out loud. I'll you just focus. Okay. Okay, because we'll have the timer going out there. I'll watch you and I'll stop the time when you finish.

1:05:02Okay, get ready. Get set. Go.

1:05:2617.72. Super fast. Cool. Now turn this paper around.

1:05:35Awesome. Draw two more lines. you're going to do this one more time. Okay. You're going to end with the same outcome. So the output at the end is going to be, I'm a great multitasker one through 20, but the way in which you will arrive will be very different. Okay. You're going to alternate. You're going to start at one, at the top line. You're going to write the letter I. You're going to drop down to the bottom line, write the number one back up to the top line. M. Letter A, and then down to the bottom line, number two back up to the top line. After every letter. Mm-hmm. Okay. You're going to go back and forth until you finish both lines.

1:06:11Okay. Okay. Now, listen, listen. If you think, hold on, I'm going to lose time, right? Going back and forth. Like, meaning just my hand moving, right? You can, if you want, you can draw one extra long line, but you have to still alternate. So that means you still have to write in between I, one, two, A. Okay. All right. But I just want to give you options. Get ready. Get set. Yeah. Go. You got this.

1:07:09This is where you guys need to overlay some fun music.

1:07:17Done. Done? 40 seconds. Because you went from 17.72 to 41.35. More than double. More than double. So, and I have a question. We all saw, but did you ever make any mistakes? Oh yeah, a lot. Okay. Because this time I was focused on like just, yeah, like my brain was not able to comprehend like two things at the same time. Yeah. Well, really, your brain can't. This is the point I want to make. So you're saying nobody can be a good multitasker. No, no. Listen, let's be clear. Let's define what we're talking about here. when people talk about multitasking the way they talk about it is as if they're doing two different things with full fidelity at the same time that's how they talk about it yeah when they talk about multitasking they're like yeah i'm doing this and i'm doing this yeah okay how many brains do you have one yeah okay that how many attention systems do you have like you have one of everything Okay.

1:08:35So you don't have two brains. You cannot say with my full Raj brain, 100 % performance, I am 100 % doing this. And at the same time, I am 100 % doing this. You don't have two 100s. You have one 100. So if you want, you can take your 100%, like a pie chart. You can dice it up. You could say 50-50. 50 % of my attention is on this, 50 % on this. 80-20, 70-30, 60-40. No matter what your split is, you're splitting your attention. It's split. So when we talk about multitasking, the way people talk about it, they, yeah, yeah, I have my phone here, but I'm not looking. I have my email open, but I'm focused here.

1:09:16When the notice comes up, no, I see you go and you look. Even when you're on calls with people, you're like on a Zoom call with somebody and they're looking at you. And then all of a sudden you see their eyes go down and up again. We can all see you, right? Nobody's that slick. The people think like nobody's going to notice. You know, you said, yeah, because you've seen other people do it. I've seen other people do it. Everyone's doing it. And they think that I can see when other people are doing it, but nobody can tell when I do it because I'm fast. No, we can all see. My point here is that it's not your choice.

1:09:52It's not your choice to pay attention or not pay attention to distractions when they come up. The way that the brain works is it's a monotasking machine, not a multitasking machine. It is designed to focus on one thing. Now, does that mean you can never do two things at once? No, of course not. Listen, in my car, I listen to podcasts. I sometimes make calls. I call my mother. I call my mom on my way somewhere. I have her on speaker, you know, I'm driving. But listen, in that moment, I'm going to be honest with you, because this is just as a neuroscientist, I can just tell you this is how the brain works.

1:10:36I am not 100 % focused on the road. yeah otherwise it's impossible i'm not going to hear my mom i don't i'm not going to listen to anything she's saying which listen that's a whole nother conversation about moms she's like complaining on my knee my back with this or that you didn't you need to come home all these things okay that's a different story because it's always the same stories but the point here is that for sure it's not possible for me to 100 focus on the conversation and 100 focus on the road because I know where I'm going in my hometown. Honestly, it's like... Yeah. It's like an autopilot.

1:11:10You're just going there. Bingo. So my point is, listen, it's nuanced. I'm not saying, Raj, you can never do... Yeah, yeah, sure. You can, but you just have to know the math. You have to understand the biological laws. You have to know what you're doing. Be strategic about it. Be strategic about it. And now you know that if you, and by the way, what you did just now, oh yeah, what you did here, this is not multitasking because that's impossible. Again, remember multitasking, the way it's defined, you did 100 % one thing and 100 % another thing. That's not possible. Here, what you're doing and what is possible, what happens in everybody's brains, yours, mine, everyone's, is something called task switching.

1:11:53Context switching, essentially. This we do all the time. But every single time you switch your attention from A to B, B to C, C to all of the different one thing to another, to the Apple Watch, to the phone, to the back to the document and back to the thing. And then, oh, somebody came in my office. What did you want? Every single time you switch your attention, there's a payment, a biological payment. So the brain pays for it in time, as you notice, more than double. It's not for free. Takes more time. And time is limited. Time is money. And the second thing that it takes is energy. You're going to exhaust yourself more.

1:12:29And every single time, and listen, this was easy. Whose job is this easy? You want to build an empire? You want to build a company? You want to cure cancer? Nothing is this easy. So when you're doing something hard and you really want to do good, you have to respect yourself enough to put the distractions out of sight, out of mind, notifications off, no email open, no phone next to you, no notice available, and actually focus on the thing in front of you. And in the beginning, if you're not used to it, it's going to be difficult. It's going to be painful. Your mind's going to be all over the place, but you just need to get your muscles hard again.

1:13:04You need to get your muscles strong. But what about people who are good at multitasking? Is there someone like that or is it just a myth? Do you want to know something really funny? There was a study done at Stanford that I'll send you. So they're smart, smart kids, young, healthy brains. Do you know what I mean? Sharp. Okay. So no excuses. You can't be like, they're just, they're dumb. I don't know. We got, we got good ones. This study on multitasking asked people upfront, are you a good multitasker? The people who said yes, confidently. Oh, yeah, I'm great at it. They were actually worse when they tested them.

1:13:47That's crazy. It's like a joke. It's like science jokes, right? It's absolutely mind boggling, but it's so fascinating. Why? Well, unknown to be, you know what it is? Just random belief they've built about themselves. It could be because if you multitask so much, by the way, you try because again, we talked about it. You're just context switching all the time. Your brain is just foggy. I don't think you see straight. I think this is the problem with most companies right now. Most people are just bouncing back and forth and they think this is normal. And they just go like, oh, it's hard for me to focus.

1:14:24Maybe I have ADHD. Come on. 80 % of the population all of a sudden has ADHD. Why everybody started saying this? It's just like. These things because of the scrolling. That's why. Because our attention spans are shot. This is actually some of the recent research I've started doing. Truly, attention spans have just gotten worse and worse and worse. And the more you scroll, and it's, by the way, it's not all scrolling. And I'm not just giving like, you know, your podcast a pat on the back here. This is actually the research supports this. there is a massive difference between long form and short form media.

1:15:05The short form media is truly like garbage and candy for the brain. It's like junk food. That's what I mean. So how would your body feel if you fill it with junk food? Not so good. Listen, am I saying sometimes we don't have some junk food? Oh, for sure. No problem. You know, you've got to live a balanced life. You know what I mean? Life is short. Enjoy it a little bit. You know, it's okay. But if your whole diet is junk food, if you eat junk food every day, what's going to happen in one year? Not so good. Bad things. So this relationship that we have with our phones, our devices, our email. I don't want people to think I'm just talking about just TikTok either.

1:15:51People are addicted to email. They're addicted to WhatsApp. They're addicted to messaging and communicating constantly, all the time, 24-7. And that never allows them to come up with ideas. Hear what's going on inside of them. All of the stuff we talked about before, the self-awareness, you want to train your brain? That takes effort. That takes awareness. That takes focus. You want to build an empire. You want to build a business. You want to do all these things? That takes focus. And when we removed the ability to focus, this is why everybody thinks they have ADHD. Because they're not listening to their biology.

1:16:28Again, it's like the laws, like the brain works. We just tested. Everybody who's listening, you believe that Raj is super smart, obviously. That's why you're listening. That's why he's so successful. Even you couldn't do it. You more than doubled your time and you made mistakes. So think about how you work now. When you take this to your life, when you take this to your business, everybody who's listening, right? When you think about how you work, if you work constantly, I'm sitting down and then I check this and I check that. if you're doing it that way, you're going to make more mistakes and it's going to take you double the amount of time to get to your goals.

1:17:03You choose. I'm going to choose the way that's going to be fast for me. But this is what makes the people that are ultra successful different from everybody else. They just choose differently. They think about it. They're aware about it. Hold on a second. What you said, you said beautifully, I notice the days when I'm on my phone, it's harder for me to focus. So when we're shooting, when the guest is right, I tell the guys, I turn it off and I tell the guys, get it out of here. You are in a beautiful example of a CEO that has figured it out. Everybody else can do the same for themselves. So you're telling me that a lot of people think that ultra successful people have better ideas, but you're telling that they don't have better ideas.

1:17:46They just know how to protect their attention so that they can get ideas. Is that what you're saying? They have more ideas. It's like fishing. I can tell you this. This is the science of innovation and creativity. Every, by the way, inventor will tell you this. Inventors, artists, engineers, people who build, people who come up with like crazy ideas, they'll tell you for every one good idea, they had one million shit ideas. it's a numbers game you have to become like an idea machine it's it's a muscle if you're exercising your idea muscle every single day you allow your mind to explore and wander and you give it time and space to do it listen you're gonna come up with a lot of stupid ideas that's okay you have to it's a process right one day after another and then finally you're gonna hit so what should i do how how can someone become a person who gets incredible ideas all the time okay you ready this is my number one recommendation you might not like it or you might be surprised okay be bored be bored and do nothing and you get ideas by that and you get ideas let me explain Okay.

1:19:13Ideas, new ideas often come when we are mind wandering. That goes back to the neural network that I talked about earlier, the DMN, the default mode network. When that is active, your brain is creating. Remember in the beginning I said it's the storyteller in the brain. It's the storytelling machine. It's the area of the brain and the areas of the brain that are all about narration and ideas. So that's your idea machine. You need to allow the DMN to actually become active. Now, the opposite of the DMN is the central executive network, the CEN. Okay. And it, I mean, listen to the sound of it, the central executive network.

1:20:01What do you think? It's like the CEO. Yeah. What's the goal? Operator. It's the operator. Beautifully said. It's the project manager. What are we doing? What's the goal. And then anytime it's also in charge of inhibition. So inhibition is suppressing the things that seem distracting. Listen, I'm on my target. I got to focus on this. So if you're telling me, hey, hey, sir, what about this idea? I don't want to hear about ideas. I got it. I'm doing this focus. That's your central executive network and you need it. And it's mostly frontal areas, right? Because this is where a lot of your executive functioning is happening in the first place.

1:20:41So you've got all these different, this neural network that's again, responsible for get shit done, right? Focus and do stuff. The opposite of that is the DMN. And the DMN is again, all about stories, daydreaming, being bored, let your mind wander. When you daydream, that's when a bunch of ideas can finally come and float to the surface. So the first step is you have to find time and space to be bored to be bored to daydream to let your mind wander because again remember it's easy to remember and understand why what's the opposite of that get stuff done what idea are you going to have when you're like on a deadline to get shit done if you're busy all of the time and then what do people do when they're not working when are you so what how is your brain going to shove an idea into your into your in front of you right how you have to let those ideas come to you by cultivating the space for them you have to make the space for them so the most creative people the most amazing innovators by the way they force themselves to sit down some people call it think time some one of the guests you had on the show, I think Bill Gates, he was really famous by having a think week, I believe it was, you know, whole week he takes off.

1:22:03No busy work, just to think, see what ideas come. It was actually during one of his think weeks that he decided that the internet is not a fad. Can you imagine if Bill Gates didn't realize that decades ago? So these ideas come, We have to give them the space to come. And that requires discipline. Because right now, distraction is making money for these tech companies like crazy. Welcome to the distraction economy. So it's keeping everybody stuck. It's keeping everybody stuck in their old loops. Because also this is how the algorithm works. The algorithms that you're doom scrolling on, that you're binge watching on, the way they work is they're going to show you stuff that you like.

1:22:53They're going to show you more of the same. If you want to become a different version of you, you need to change your content. Your content is actually a great example of this. A lot of other awesome podcasts that are educational, right? About like, how do I become better? How do I level myself up? If all you're doing, when you're binge watching, if you're all, it's just bad news, this, that, just like whatever, you will become more of that because what you're doing is you're just true the same stories over and over again you want to start to become a different version of you a better version of you you should also change your algorithm we call this by the way in the classes i teach changing your content diet and that's very important i call it bloom scrolling oh i love that so it's like how you have doom scrolling you curate your feed in a way which is bloom scrolling so that it makes you better, not actually messes up your entire system.

1:23:55Yeah. It's a beautiful way to put it. So you've got to give yourself think time. Even if it's bloom or doom, you've got to put it away a little bit and then just give your mind and space to breathe. The next thing that's going to be important, and this is kind of fun, have you ever, have you heard of that anecdote that people have awesome ideas in the shower? Yeah. You've heard of it? Yeah. Have you ever had it? Of course. Really? Yeah. So many times. Okay. Hey, do you know the science behind it? No. You want to learn? Yeah, of course. I want to learn all the science in the world. Tell me. Okay.

1:24:26So this is the science behind shower thoughts, shower ideas that so many people have. I've had the same thing as well. So the way that the brain works is you're loading up, let's say, remember the neural networks I talked about before, right? So let's say you've got this pattern of electrical activation happening in the brain, right? These neural networks that are on different brain areas, all of this stuff. So you have this pattern of electrical activation. Let's say it looks like this, okay? Some gridlock. Let's say this is your brain thinking about a problem. So you're there and you're thinking about this problem in your head.

1:25:05Right now, what's in my brain? The problem. The problem. Stuck. Yeah. Where's the solution? If I want a solution to the problem, I actually have to move these networks around. I have to get different electrical activity to happen. Because my brain's occupied with this. It's focused on the problem. So this is how you do it. This is the best way. I teach all of the business leaders I work with this. You load up all of the data and the information that you need that's about the problem. You think about the problem. You understand the problem. You look at all the data related to the problem. Load it all up.

1:25:42Then walk away. You're going to sit there and be like, okay, and then what do we do? What's the solution? What's the solution? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Get up and do something else. When you do something else, you're at least introducing a new variable. You're at least saying, hey, drink some water at least. Seriously, something as small as this. Because anything you do, anything you touch, smell, drink, listen. Listen to a different playlist, different music. Get up and move to another room. If you're sitting at your desk and you're always working at your desk and you're like, this is my focus.

1:26:12This is where I'm at. And you're just like, this is the problem. The problem is also here. It's in all of the associations that you've built up with that problem. Change the environment. So when people finally go on a walk or they go take a shower, they've loaded all the data there. So the neural networks related to the problem are still active. They're recently at least active. So then you get in the shower and you introduce new variables. Now you're not scrolling either because again, the scrolling is a distraction. if you distract yourself with i gotta text these people back i get on whatsapp i get all these things you're not going to solve any problems because now you're just doing more stuff true you're doing more stuff you have to not do stuff to give your brain space to say wait a minute light bulb because the problem was still there and active and then you're introducing new variables whatever they may be.

1:27:09Have a little sip of water, put some water on your brain, whatever it is. You got to do something different. And then your brain goes at some point, oh, I got it. And that's why you, because you're mindlessly just standing in shower, all of a sudden you get that because you're not focused on problem anymore. Yeah. You loosened a little bit and you introduced new data. You introduced new variables and new data. It could be on a walk. You could start cooking dinner. You could go exercise, go on a run, whatever you want to do. But not something so immersive that you can't keep thinking about the other thing.

1:27:53So don't go sit down and watch a movie. Do you see what I'm saying? Unless you want to watch a movie you've seen 1 ,000 times. Do you know how you can still think? Well, So now you get it. See, there's neuroscience to explain all of these human experiences we have. If you're watching a rerun of an old sitcom you've seen like a million times, it's kind of soothing. Because you're not really just focused and paying attention. You're letting your mind wander a little bit. But when you're scrolling, it's all novel. So it's designed by people like me, by the way. Cognitive neuroscience is people like me who are hired by these companies.

1:28:33we use everything we know about how to capture your attention and keep your attention to make money off of you. It's all embedded in how all of these things work. Explain me what's happening to a person when they're consuming long-form content versus what's happening when they're consuming only short-form content. Like what's going on in the brain? Like if you have to draw parallels to long-form brain and short-form brain. Yeah. Well, it also depends on the content. I'll say that. We've seen negative content, like the news, honestly. I'll say something about the news briefly. News media also knows what sells and what captures attention.

1:29:20Yeah, that's why they do the negative stuff. Yeah, because bad news, rage bait, it works. And listen, if one company starts using it, one news channel starts using it, and the other one goes oh that's well that's not fair they're gonna hurt the ratings are gonna hurt if they don't also adapt so now everybody's doing it yeah like since the time of like evolution the most

1:29:49primitive feeling that human beings have is threat threat for survival so the more you induce threat more people find it like more people get anxious and more they get anxious they want to keep consuming that content and that's why a lot of news media all around the world is just tapping on that one primitive emotion that is i'm gonna make you sure that you feel keep feeling anxious and anxious and anxious and the way you feel anxious is when i tell you everything is wrong yeah like no matter what you're doing is wrong and i find out new ways to make you feel that everyone's against you everything's against you tomorrow morning you're gonna get up and things going to go down.

1:30:27So we just tap on this emotion since the time of evolution. And that's why there's just negative stuff all around. See, it's hard for us to make positive content and grow. It is. It is. It would be easier to do it the other way. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. If I start today, like you and I, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like this, we can make this go 10x more viral if we start just making it about threats and anxieties. Totally. About the world. And it's so sad. Yeah. But it is how the world works. It's how the brain works. It's not, you know, this is another biological law. You can ignore it, but other companies know it and they're using it against you.

1:31:12So we should learn the laws. But that's so sad, man. Shouldn't we change it? I mean, we're trying to change it from what we do. We're trying to teach people how to get better. Yeah. But, I mean, to each their own. Yeah. But I will say we can't change our biology in that way. We keep thinking for survival and threat. We have to because this is an evolution. I mean, this has been like... Thousands of years. Yeah. That's going to be too hard. What you can do, though, is you can cut yourself off from things. I've met many really high-powered executives that have had to do some pretty serious cleansing of their content.

1:32:03because you know and some of them if they're really in a dark place and their minds are just so foggy and so busy we have to cut them off completely from the news for a little while and you know what i tell them the world's going to go to shit whether you're looking at it or not you're not that important like you're not involved in global news i know you're you know fancy ceo running a company but like you're not like deciding on what's happening with the war Yeah. Do you know what I mean? So instead of you every single day, 15 times a day, checking all of the different updates that are coming in and it's completely fogging up your mind, it's now you can't anymore.

1:32:45at least until you read it's like rehabilitation until you rehab yourself back to you can hear yourself again this is another big issue that i've seen you know people complain they say like they can't hear their own thoughts anymore there's no internal narration that's where all those ideas are going to come from too it's coming from the inside it's not coming from the outside of course you can use the outside stuff to trigger some ideas but ideas are still coming from inside yeah yeah people have lost their ability to actually have internal thoughts that's so true it's like we don't have internal thinking anymore very few people i meet these days who have their original way of thinking and some thoughts which are their own okay coming back to long-form content, long form brain versus short form brain.

1:33:45So people who are watching long form content have a sense of story and narration because long form, think movies, think a journey, a long form podcast that you sink into. There's highs, there's lows, there's turns that you didn't anticipate, right? Like we didn't plan to talk about long form and short form, but we arrived here. You know, there's a whole journey that we're on. So there's a sense of story and narration. This is going to be critical, again, for that creativity and for something that we call autobiographical planning. This is all, again, DMN. So you're able to actually activate that more and do a lot more of your own internal planning, right?

1:34:27What is autobiographical planning? Autobiographical planning is essentially you talking about the story of you and planning your future. And the one where we have to change our future by thinking positive and optimism and having a belief where I am the main character and everything nice happens with me. That narration is going to come through the story and narrative. Yeah. And that's autobiographical planning. Okay. That is literally what we talked about in the very beginning. That is the definition of autobiographical planning. Is you sit down and you think, you make the story and you say the story of who you are going to be.

1:35:09But think about kids these days. They almost never do that. Because they're scrolling most of the time. So they're letting the outside world. I know so many old people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Way old, 10 years older than me. They don't know about their autobiographical planning. Yeah. They have no idea about this story. So sad. But it's the autobiographical planning, by the way, is something that happens when we're bored. That's why boredom is so important. We have to find ways to force it. Force it if you need to be bored. And by the way, I'm not saying be bored for five hours a day. No, no, no, no.

1:35:45Yeah. We got to get shit done. But a little bit every day. Sundays are for boredom. Sundays are for boredom. My personal opinion, just a little bit in the morning and a little bit before bed. Pretty nice. If you can manage it sometimes in the afternoon, because sometimes the afternoons people have crazy ideas because they're tired. They have a little bit of a slump. And when you are a little bit slumping in your energy, oftentimes your inhibition is lower. So you come up with crazy ideas. You just go, let's do this. You just like, it's like being a little drunk. You're just like, why not? Let's do it.

1:36:19Let's go after it. So, okay, long form. You got story and narrative. because long form content typically also does a lot of work around like character building right like for example think of the difference between your podcasts that are many hours long where you actually really get to know the guest really like there's a sense of personalization in here like people will learn about the person then you actually develop empathy yeah and by the way there's a study for this that we can link here where, uh, long form media like films have actually been shown to increase empathy in people. Wow. So the power of long form media, the power of movies, long form podcasts that are educational, you can actually increase different things and memory.

1:37:15You will remember long form media. True. Now we go to this side here, by the way, in case, in case someone right now is watching this in a short, okay, that's fine. I dare you for just the next second, try to remember three reels ago. If you're scrolling right now, if you're scrolling right now, I, what was the three reels ago? What did you see? If you can't remember, I don't want you to feel shame. You're not alone. I can't remember either. And it's because short form scrolling is designed for you to just it's just like crack. You're just going to move from one thing to the other. It's just full novelty.

1:38:02So there's no memory. So you have less memory, which, by the way, what's another word for memory? Learning. People think they're like exposing themselves to like new ideas and you can't freaking remember it. what's your it's not you're not absorbing any of it there's no if there's no memory there's no learning here you have an opportunity to learn by the way not very many people know this but um when i was growing up um a lot of people think because i do so much research on like screen time and scrolling and technology and stuff that i like never watched when i was little i watched hours of tv every day like unlimited television no limits at all from my family so didn't your brain become this mush yeah we didn't have short form reels i'm a little old you know there were no cell phones man this was before that time we had old school uh you know i even the first tv i had to go and change the buttons on the on the actual television But no, my mom, my mom and my dad requested that I watch television.

1:39:16So I learn English. I was born in the United States, but my family didn't speak that much English because we had immigrated. They had immigrated. I was born here. But they wanted me to learn English. So and they couldn't teach me. So then they said, you have to sit. You have to sit down. TV time. I had to sit there and I had to watch. But everything is long form. And listen, go look at an old TV show or an old movie from 20 years ago, 30 years ago. And I want you to count how many times the scene changes. Cuts. And now compare it to something that came out recently. Wildly different. Our attention spans have gotten so bad.

1:40:05And producers know this, directors know this, editors know this, that the more you cut things up, the more it's going to capture attention. This is even in shows for little kids. Little kids shows are totally different than what they used to be. Yeah. Like I know there's now Netflix in all of their meetings. They ask this one question to the person who's selling them the show. is like, is it second screen viewing or no? Because Netflix wants to make all their shows based on second screen, not the first screen because they know they're already watching like phone. So is it like when someone's on their phone, can they still watch it and be engaged?

1:40:49Can you actually make them stop their phone and watch and then come back or no? Like you don't have to make like one long scene where somebody, if they go to their phone, they forget what was happening. So they have to make it like super, super quick. You know how depressing that is when we think about how many billions of people right now on this planet want to become successful. Listen, you started your own empire. Do you talk about how hard you've had to work to make that happen? How much focus it requires? Dedication? Nobody's taking that many off days. I can tell you this. I have a business.

1:41:33I tell people this all the time. If you want off days, go get a job. Yeah. Because they give you time off. True. I run a lab. It's my heart and my soul is in it. I don't, I'm always thinking about it. It's like my baby. Your business is your baby. There's no off. You don't become not a mother. Just It's it. True. So if we know that's what it takes to succeed, and we right now are letting these companies train our brains in such a way that it's making it impossible even to watch a movie and focus. Think about how boring it is sometimes. Sometimes, not all the time, but to run a business and start a business.

1:42:19Sometimes you've got to do some boring shit. It's hard. but you got to get through it. Listen, I do science. Like you got to, it's a slog. You got to analyze data. You got to be looking at stuff. You have to sit there. You have to work late at night. Sometimes you're working hard and it's not fun. It's not always like a movie. If we are training the next generation of brains in the world to be so distracted and so unfocused that they need to, I mean, this is crazy. To me, it feels like mass manipulation. The world doesn't want people thinking. It's easier to control people if they're dumb and not thinking at all.

1:43:03They're distracted. Depressing thought, but we go back to this. Okay. So you've got short form, there's story, or in long form, there's story and narrative. Here, there's no memory. There's no learning. Short form scrolling has also, there's data to support this. Increase in depressive symptoms. We know people are more sad. We see an increase in anxiety. The more you scroll short form reels, short form media, the more anxious you get. Really? Yes. But what if I'm just laughing and I'm watching funny reels? It's about the cuts. It's about how short it is. Don't, if you want to laugh, watch a 20 minute video on YouTube.

1:43:51That's funny. It's literally, we're just talking about long and short. We're not even talking about the content, but that jumpy back and forth, the cuts create more, it seems more anxiety. Now you get depressive symptoms, an increase in anxiety and an increase in loneliness. Whereas here in long form, we see empathy. And empathy, by the way, allows you to connect more. So you'd have an increase in connection versus an increase in loneliness. So they're like opposites of each other. But what's happening in my brain, which is making me lonelier if I consume short form? What's the correlation? You know, I will say this.

1:44:31We're not 100 % sure, but I will give you my hypothesis. As somebody who is studying this right now, what I believe is happening in the brain when, like, why is it that we are experiencing the loneliness epidemic right now? It's not just in the United States. We're seeing it pretty much across any part of the world that has embraced technology. We see this increase in loneliness. Why? Does it make any sense? Because think about it. You and I and your team, we were all able to connect when we were halfway across the world from each other. It's pretty cool. Technology is pretty amazing like that.

1:45:08So I'm not saying, oh, I'm not like anti-tech, like, oh, it's terrible. It's pretty cool. It allows people to connect from all over. It's amazing. But that means we're more connected. So how could it be possible that we're more lonely? Well, again, let's think about the craving and then the behavior and that whole response loop we talked about before. When I am, let's say, for example, I'm seeking connection. And let me begin by saying one other important biological law. There's a biological law that's very important for us to accept. It's not your choice. Human beings are pack animals. We're designed for a collective.

1:45:48We're not designed to live like lone wolves in silos. That means human connection is a need, like food or like water. You need it. You'll get sick if you don't get it. and that's been proven yeah long-haul truck drivers who don't get a lot of socializing they have nobody to talk to for days and weeks sometimes literally their brains start to degrade they start to atrophy like they're experiencing almost like accelerated aging or dementia it's so sad because a lot of them are young guys most of the time but okay going back to this uh And when you are craving social connection, which is a natural need, we all do it, we all need it, so we all have the craving.

1:46:38You have two options, let's say. You can either reach out to a friend, somebody you're living with, your family, you know, talk to somebody, whoever's nearby, pick up the phone and call somebody, text somebody. At least, you know, there's like a whole from the best is like in real life, real connection. Yeah. Live. Okay. Next best is maybe the phone or something or FaceTime or something like that. Maybe a text. But if you say, oh, I want to know what other people are doing. If you get on social media, listen, let's be honest. Social media is not social anymore. Right? When you open up Instagram, it used to be when they first started, you would see the pictures and videos that your friends would post.

1:47:23Yeah. It's not like that anymore. It's other people you don't know. It's other people you don't know. So you are seeking social connection and then you go on to short form media. And then you start scrolling. So you're distracted. Sure, you're distracted. But it feels kind of good in the moment, doesn't it? Yeah, distraction feels good. So it's like eating candy when you're hungry. So you're hungry. You're hungry for something real, really food. But you eat candy instead. What happens when you eat candy when you're hungry? In one hour. You feel more hungry. Yeah, you're hungry again. Because you never filled yourself with nutrition, with the food your body needs.

1:48:08So you were, let's say, you were seeking social connection. It's like hunger. But instead of really seeking true connection, you instead went to short form media and you're scrolling. It's like candy. So you're just going to be even hungrier in another hour. So then you were maybe a little lonely before. Now you're even more lonely. because it's never satisfying that need. It never satisfies that need. My hypothesis is that what's happening in the brain is there's first dopamine. Dopamine is the brain's primary motivation molecule. So dopamine is all about motivation. You have dopamine and you have a desire for social connection.

1:49:00That's what you want. So you're motivated towards it. So in order to get this need met, what do you do? Let's say you do the, there's two options. Option A, option B. We'll go two options here. One option is you go short form. You scroll. Okay. So you grab the phone

1:49:20versus you grab a person. We, they're friends. There we go. Yay. Okay. So there's two other brain chemicals that I want to bring into the mix here. Okay. There's something called oxytocin and there's something called serotonin. Okay. So you've got oxytocin and serotonin. Oxytocin, if you've ever heard of this, this is a hormone that's known as the bonding hormone. So this is what bonds humans together. So if your dopamine levels are high, so meaning you're motivated for what? Social connection? That means what you want is oxytocin. You're seeking it. This might be what we could say, this is what's satisfying it.

1:50:05This would satisfy it. And also serotonin is another neuromodulator that makes you feel good and content. Makes you feel content and good. So bonding satisfaction. Very good. Yes. So this This is really like the science of what it is that we're looking for here. I'm looking for this, but really like I need these things in order to check this box. Okay. If you go to short form, do you think, what are we bonding with? I don't know. Like if I get on and I see one of your reels or I see one of my own, right? Where we both have short form media. I'm not bonding with this person. I don't even know them.

1:50:41True. So I'm not getting any oxytocin. contentment I'm not getting because I already told you it increases anxiety right and depressive symptoms so it's leaving the person more sad so while they're doing it they don't notice because while you're eating the candy come on man it tastes good yeah we all think it tastes good it's delicious but afterwards is when you feel bad it's afterwards where you're like oh my god I ate too much and I feel like crap it is it wasn't nutritious now if you actually seek real social connection, then you get the oxytocin, you get the serotonin. So you actually get to check the box.

1:51:16So you had the dopamine, you were motivated, you sought social connection, you got social connection. Good. But that doesn't happen. Not if you go this way. If you're, if let's say, for example, dopamine goes high because you're hungry or you're thirsty, like right now you and I have water. I go, I am thirsty. So I have this need. Dopamine goes up. That's motivation. Motivation so I can recruit my motor cortex and everything else to go and grab the water to drink from it. If I drink from it, then I satisfy the need. I got a little bit of hydration, so I feel better. Now, if I had the same loop, but I never get the water, I don't know, go eat a cracker or something like this, then I might feel even worse than when I started.

1:52:08Yeah. The need's never satisfied. Well, this is how we look when we... Oh, yeah. I did. I told you before, I've always had a sweet tooth. So listen, no shame in the game. I've always loved sweets. Yeah. So this is how we look when we are going for this candy. So this is what's happening. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much. I hope that you know I I tell my students this all the time that um I'm passionate about a lot of this stuff because I'm not better than anybody else I struggle with it myself I've been addicted to scroll I've struggled with addiction to many different things in my life many things in my life I've had to break addictions I'm not above this I studied this stuff all of this stuff I even studied addiction and I still became addicted.

1:53:03Like nothing can prevent this. Like you just need the awareness, the discipline, the desire for better. You have to just do the hard work, right? It's, and listen, maybe it's like the question you asked before about the billionaire's brain. It's like, are they just born different? Maybe some, some people are probably lucky enough where they don't have a lot of this addiction stuff. You know, I was not one of those people. I love I love chocolate. I love sweets. I would eat dessert all day if I could. So I have to create systems in my life in order to create balance. It doesn't come naturally. You have to be systems minded.

1:53:40Aware systems minded, you gotta have the discipline. And I think that's the only way around it. So what are we gonna do? I'm gonna show you a city map. Okay. Explain me how my brain works as if it was a city. So nice looking, huh? Hmm. Okay, all right. where should I begin for you? So not that this is what the brain actually looks like, right? It's not perfectly accurate in terms of locations. But what I think is really beautiful about this particular setup you have here is you have so many of the different brain areas and the neural networks that I think are the most important for performance.

1:54:21They're the most relevant. You know what I mean? We don't, nobody, not every single person needs to go get a PhD in neuroscience. You know what I mean? This is like, tell me the stuff I need to know. Yeah. The meaty stuff. The meaty stuff. Yeah. Okay. So let's use actually an example because we're here to learn about getting shit done and being productive. I have a goal. I want to meet my goals, right? How do I do that? Yeah. How do I become this person who ends up achieving all the goals? Yes. Yes. Okay. Let's say, what does that look like for you, by the way? But you want to achieve your goals.

1:54:54A lot of it is like stuff on the computer. Yeah. Right. You sit down and you're reading, you're writing. Researching, coming up with questions, thinking a lot. Beautiful. And it's on the computer, right? In your office or wherever, somewhere. So in order for that to happen, a few things. One, the default mode network that we talked about before here called beautifully Story Studios, right? It's where all the stories are made. This is the story making machine. So the story about myself that, hey, I want to be this podcaster and this and that, it's here. Beautiful. Yes. And how you're going to get there too.

1:55:32Like it's going to happen. I need to do research. So this story network is sending information and that information is going into City Hall. This is your CEN, your central executive network, the CEO, the very front section of the brain. And this is going, okay, Raj wants to be the number one podcast in the world. Okay. You want to build that. That's what we're, that's the goal. That's what we're going towards. Then your CEN, this sort of frontal parietal area, that's going to be focused on how you do that. Goal achievement, goal directed attention. It's going to try to quiet everything else down and just stay focused on whatever it is you're doing.

1:56:12So let's say you're doing research. So you're on your computer and you're doing research on the next thing, right? You have meaning. This is where the meaning is coming from. Why? Why am I doing it? It's coming from the story. Then you have City Hall, the CEO that's actually going towards the thing, making it happen. Okay? Then you have a really important place here. It's another neural network. It's not just a place, it's a network. The Dorsal Attention Network, the D-A-N. The D-A-N is like the watchtower looking. I don't know if you've seen Lord of the Rings. No. No? It's the Eye of Sauron, okay, for those that have seen it.

1:56:51This is the watchtower. The D-A-N is looking. And it's pointing a spotlight, you know? So it's like a flashlight or a spotlight of your attention on whatever it is that it needs to focus on. Whatever it is that, and this is the tricky part, it says it needs to focus. on. Who's telling it where to shine the light? The city hall? Sure. The city hall can do that. You know who else might in the middle? Not this one necessarily. The alarm tower. If there's an emergency and this one says, hey, oh my God, panic. Then the DAN will say, Raj, stop focusing on your Google Doc. We have emergencies happening.

1:57:34Go look at this. Or for example, the dispatch center. This salience network. This is like emergency calls, your satellite system. Something is happening. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not an emergency. Maybe it's not an alarm. That's your amygdala. It's a walnut-sized area deep inside of the center of the brain. And that brain area is the brain's alarm system. Meow, meow, meow. Every time there's some sort of emergency, okay? So that's the alarm tower. You've got this amazing team, okay? That is either going to help you meet your goals or it's going to make it potentially more difficult, but it depends on how you set yourself up for success.

1:58:17So going back to the example, you sit down and you have a goal. That's your meaning. Okay. Your CEO, your CEN, but it's your CEO, let's say, that's going to start focusing. Okay. Okay. Your DAN says, got it. No problem. Let's focus on the computer. Let's focus on the research. So your DAN, the watchtower goes. it's focusing on the work. As long as you keep focusing and as long as nothing distracts you or interrupts you, then maybe as long as you can, you will keep focusing. This is my tension. Yeah. But what's the usual setup? Remember when we talked about your phone and where you keep it? It's like, there's one notification, another, there are five tabs opening, two people talking and then I have to be everywhere and then I have to message.

1:59:06Yep. probably scroll a little in between. That's what always happens. So now you've got, every time the notification comes in, salience network goes, hey, look over here. What's over there? Oh, what's that? And then 911, this dispatch center, the salience network says, look over here. The watchtower goes, what do you want me to look at? So it looks at something else. So this area, the salience network, is what is the external, essentially distraction. It is telling you where to orient your attention. So that's why you need to keep your digital hygiene clean. You need to have good digital hygiene when you're sitting down to work.

1:59:48Otherwise, you're setting yourself up for failure instead of success. So to shut this down. You have to shut that down. Well, it's not shut it down. You can't shut it down. It's there to keep you alive. You have to clean your environment and control your environment so that you set this whole system up for success. This is, you can't shut this down. The brain is going to do its thing. These are the biological laws, remember? Like gravity, you can't fight this thing. This is the brain. Okay. But then I want to clean my environment in a way so that it doesn't get triggered. Yeah. Okay. Think about, you know, a lot of people have young kids, right?

2:00:27Imagine if you have a kid and they go to school and then they come back with a bad grade. And they really studied hard, you know? And then they're like so sad about it. You find out that the teacher let them all be on their phones, talk. There was like a party. They're playing music. Like all these things were happening. People were chit-chatting with each other. People were coming in and out while they were sitting down and taking their exam. All the parents would go crazy. They would be like, this is not fair. This is not how you run a classroom. This is not how you give an exam. And then they would pretty much say like, we demand a redo.

2:01:03You have to redo it. But how do you sit down and work? You're a leader like I am. I run a team, right? When our teams sit down to actually get work done, what's their environment like? Is it built for focus or is it built for distraction? So this is all of these amazing different brain areas are there to keep you alive. They're there for a purpose, for sure. But what are these two? Hippocampus, which is library and archive. This is just your memories. And your memories, by the way, are very, very close typically to the amygdala. So your hippocampus and the amygdala are rather close. This is an important, I would say, maybe an important note.

2:01:49Your amygdala is the seat of a lot of fear, right? Fear and anxiety, negative affect. Your hippocampus is the seat of a great deal of memory. Things that are negative and scary are more memorable. So, and this is actually true technically for all emotion. If you can heighten your emotions, you will remember the situation better. If you can increase, for example, even your anxiety about whether you'll forget it or not. If you're afraid of forgetting something, you're less likely to forget.

2:02:32So how do I improve my memory then of the positive things? in general improving your memory and this is actually a i think kind of a fun fact that's a little bit counterintuitive if you want to strengthen your memory open the aperture of your attention if you you can only remember what you're attending to right you can't remember something that you weren't paying attention to yeah so if you can heighten and sharpen your focus and your attention, then your memory will get better. It's like the funnel, right? The attention is what you're paying attention to, all the stuff that's getting in. So if you want more stuff to get in, focus on your attention.

2:03:22If you want to remember more stuff, right? Things have to come in in order to go down into memory. Yeah. That's pretty much the end of the brain city map. One thing that I keep failing at is waking up super early. And I've tried so many times. Like I... I've somehow...

2:03:47What do you say? Somehow trained myself to get up at like 7.30, 8am. But I'm still not able to do the 5am club. Like I've tried really hard. Why do you want to do the 5am club? Isn't it like you become better, your energy gets better, you focus better, all of a sudden your life turns around, this whole hype around 5am club, early to rise, early to bed, all that. Isn't it like that? It's bullshit. for some people, yeah, for some people, but not for everybody. The most important is the foundation, the principle, the biological law and the principle is that you need to be getting enough high quality sleep.

2:04:31Shoot for seven hours minimum. That should be the goal. So if you're getting enough sleep, that's the most important. This is the foundation. It doesn't really matter what time you wake up, right? This myth, this is truly like people get off on this idea that, you know, we have the saying, the early bird gets the worm, right? We have all of these sayings because waking up late and staying up late has been historically associated with being lazy, the sloth. It doesn't have to be that way. I'm actually really proud of so many, I would say, modern day leaders that are actually coming out of the closet of being night owls, of being PM shifted.

2:05:14Sundar, the CEO of Google, has come out and admitted that he does some of his best thinking at like 10 PM. I didn't know about it. What did he say? That he does his best thinking at like late at night. And some days he like, you know, after like dinner, blah, blah, blah, he like likes to really like, that's his, sometimes his really high quality focus time. that's like that's some of the because he's pm shifted now i know that we gave you to do it a biological chronotype assessment as well but i want to first talk about chronotypes in general so this whole idea of being in the 5 a.m club and all of this stuff this comes from society and it's honestly bs we don't need it why do you call it 5 a.m club porn like 5 a.m porn What is it?

2:05:59Okay. There's this whole, I don't even know what to call it. It's like a club of people, okay, that believe that, and they love doing this as a habit. And you know what? Listen, if it works for you, do it. I think it's great. I know lots of people that wake up at five o 'clock in the morning. And listen, I'm not getting up super late either. I think it's great. But the most important thing is to listen to your body. I call it 5 a.m. club porn because there's so many blogs and books and other podcasts, tweets. You see all of these different like just articles and all of this content about people.

2:06:36It's like if you want to be the most successful version of yourself, you need to wake up at 430 in the morning and then you need to do 25 pushups. And then you need to drink a tall glass of lemon water with cayenne in it. And then you need to do a cold plunge. And then you need to do this. And then you need to sauna. then this, then that. And it's like, oh my God, what are we doing? Like it, listen, if you are not getting at least seven hours of high quality sleep, what's the point of you waking up at five, right? Because of this like idea that we're all like addicted to that like, see, it's like, I call it porn because it seems like such a great idea, but it's not, it's only a good idea.

2:07:15Like if you've got all the other things like lined up truly, like it's this thing that people are obsessed with. So they're talking about it and writing about it. And it's like, look, this one CEO woke up at five and he does all this shit before 7am. And that's why he's successful. And it's just not true. That's not why he's successful. It's one of his strategies. But some other CEOs do some of their best work from 8pm to midnight. It doesn't matter which time it is. It matters which time it is for you. And each person is a little bit different. In 2017, the Nobel Prize in medicine went to three researchers who discovered that human beings do not share one circadian rhythm.

2:08:03So circadian rhythms are the biological sort of clock that we have that tells us when that we have high energy, low energy, so on and so forth. Peaks and troughs of energy throughout the course of the day.

2:08:17We thought that all humans, generally speaking, we wake up with the sun, right? Creatures of light. We wake up with the sun and we go to bed at night. Story is a little more complicated. Welcome to science, right? It's like a little more complicated than we thought. In 2017, the Nobel Prize in Medicine went to these three researchers who discovered we don't share one circadian rhythm, we at least have three genetic what are called chronotypes. Now, your chronotype is your genetic optimum of when you feel the most energized, when you feel the most motivated. It's even for physical fitness, it makes a big difference.

2:08:59Ideal times you should wake up, go to sleep, so on and so forth. Okay. Now, Now the three major chronotypes are AM shifted, which are the folks that wake up naturally, hormonally, pretty early in the morning. Biphasic, which is in the middle, stands for the Latin two phases or two peaks. Okay. And the third, PM shifted. The AM shifted people, they linearly decrease in energy over the course of the day. Now, these individuals usually by even early evening are struggling a little bit, right? And their bodies will naturally wake them up. How do you know your AM shifted versus the second type, biphasic?

2:09:43If you wake up super early in the morning, no matter what, even if you go to bed late, your body will wake you up. Can you imagine? Like you go to bed at like two, three o 'clock in the morning. For some people, it doesn't matter. Their body's going to wake them up at five. I know. You're like, not me. No. I can sleep at 10 and still not wake up at 5. Good for you. Wow, really? You're a good, you can do that? Yeah, I can sleep very long. As long as a lamala doesn't hit it, I don't get up. But rarely I get up. That's a blessing. Congratulations. Yeah, either I can't sleep or if I sleep then... You're sleeping.

2:10:20It's such a, it's a gift, by the way. It's such a blessing. It truly. I sometimes I'm like I have to have systems for it but I am pm shifted which means naturally I could if left to my own devices I would be up until like two three o 'clock in the morning easily team like by four I'm like now I'm ready maybe to go to bed yeah but this is not functional if I'm going to bed at four then I probably wouldn't wake up and I have like blackout curtains and an eye mask and all of this stuff to help keep me asleep. And then I'm not waking up until way late in the morning. And you know, you get this, you run a business, I run a business, like this is not possible.

2:11:00Okay. So I got to get up. So that means I have to create systems. So I go to bed usually around like 11 by midnight. I'm asleep. This is my. Okay. That's good. That's not bad. No. And you can do that. So I'm telling you genetically, biologically, my body wants to go to bed in the two to 4 a.m. range, I'm able to shift it back at least three hours through behavioral adjustments. Those behavioral adjustments I can outline with you because if you want to share your results. Yeah. So you gave me this whole questionnaire to fill to find out, can we do something like, so I filled that questionnaire.

2:11:41It took me like three, four minutes. It didn't take me long. Can we do that for people as well? Can you give me some links so that a lot of people who want to find out what are they, what's their natural type of sleeping and waking up and what is the hour where they feel the most energetic versus when they feel really sloppy? If they want to find out, can we have some link of this test to something? Yes. Yeah. Our lab has, it's www.mychronotype.com and we can absolutely give folks access to it so they don't have to pay for it, but to get the assessment done. The same assessment you did. Perfect, done.

2:12:19So we're gonna go through my results and then we'll put out a link in the description for anyone who wants to actually go test it. Okay, so this is what the report was. Yes, let's look at it. So here's an outline first of just the three types, right? The three different types we talked about, AM shifted, biphasic and PM shifted. And anybody else who's watching, if you also take the assessment, you're going to get a report as well, a PDF report that's going to go over all of this information. So these are the three main chronotypes. Now, as you can see here in the center, we have population distributions.

2:12:53The population distribution here shows that the majority of people in the world are biphasic. Even they are not like 5 a.m. types. No. So that's why I say it's stupid. This 5 a.m. club for everybody. Like, oh, if you want to be the most successful version of yourself, you've got to wake up at 5. But bullshit. No, you don't. No, you don't. This is great for like a quarter of the human population that naturally they prefer to go to bed early and wake up early. Amazing. If that's you, enjoy. Brilliant. Brilliant. Good for you. No one force that on me. Yeah. Go work in finance. Everybody's waking up at five and it was great.

2:13:26Awesome. Awesome. The majority of the human population is biphasic. Also, research from my lab shows, by the way, PM shifted is actually closer to 10 % of the human population. So super minority. So the biphasic energy curve, biphasic stands for the Latin two phases or two peaks. So that means these individuals have a mid-morning peak. So not first thing in the morning. So they need like 45 minutes, maybe an hour to kind of ramp up. But they're going to peak in their cortisol levels, their epinephrine, all of this amazing hormones that keep you focused and alert and awake and excited. They're going to get there.

2:14:02Give it an hour. So if you wake up in the morning and you're like, oh, okay. But then within 45 minutes, you're like, I feel amazing. But in an hour, you feel amazing? Probably you're biphasic. Now, these individuals, that's their first peak in the morning. Second, and then they come down for a super afternoon dip. Super afternoon dip. Like they're crashing. These folks crash harder than anybody else. So they could really take a nap, you know, in the middle of the day. But if they listen to their body, maybe they take a break. Maybe they do a workout. Maybe they do some other stuff. They take a little bit of a break.

2:14:40After that, they get a second wind. A focus again. Yeah, a second peak. Sometimes it's early evening. Sometimes it's later evening. Sometimes it's late afternoon. It really depends when you wake up. But you will have another peak if you're biphasic, if you play your cards right. This is what I mean by leverage your biology. because these people, if they don't take a proper break midday and they don't listen to their body, that second peak will be less peaky. They won't take advantage of it. To this whole nine to five, it doesn't really serve. It's not the way this is designed. You should learn what your chronotype is so you can take advantage of your peak performance hours.

2:15:23Two to three hours every single day, your brain is at its best. Is it? You know what? I know somebody, I'm not allowed to take their names, but super successful, multibillionaire, lives on a island, bunch of things, right? He did some tests with his performance coaches and all those things, right? And he says that he sleeps four hours, then functions, then sleep four hours. He doesn't sleep at, he doesn't sleep like eight hours a stretch. Will he come in biphasic? No, that's that's an old school tactic called like split sleep. Listen, it's hard on the brain and the body. That's not how our brains and our bodies are designed.

2:16:05Matthew Walker, who's also at UC Berkeley, one of the world's most renowned sleep psychologists in his book, all of his research. You know it. Literally, it spells out all of the sleep research spells out pretty clearly that we need sustained contiguous hours of sleep. You even get some higher quality benefits if you go to bed before midnight. I'm not really sure why. Kind of sucks for the PM shifted people. But it is what it is. So science would definitely disagree with that strategy for sure. now if it's working for performance you know fine but it's it's not going to work for his health it's going to be a sacrifice you know it would be like i've also met people that drink like five cups of coffee a day and they're just like okay but you're doing something not so great for yourself long at some point there will be consequences yeah yeah okay so okay you've got biphasic people as mentioned majority of the human population and then you have the tired, the lonely, the few, now really 10 to 15 % of the human population is PM shifted.

2:17:15PM shifted people prefer to go to bed later and wake up later, biologically. That's me. It is you. You are PM shifted. It is your chronotype. We were able to actually test this and see that your chronotype is PM shifted. Now, every chronotype has a peak, a dip and a recovery period. Okay. Now for a PM shifted person, and maybe for this so that you can see it too, we do it this way. Okay. So for a PM shifted person, all right. If we take the hours, let's say of like 9 AM to 1 AM that you see here on the X axis, you've got creative work, ideally being done in the morning. This might be when you have some of your best ideas.

2:18:04Why? Because you're probably a little tired in the mornings, aren't you? Yeah, I'm very tired in the morning. Because when you're tired, you're more likely to allow yourself to activate that DMN and be bored. You can just kind of sit back, give yourself a few minutes, let your mind wander, journal a little bit, brainstorm, just expose yourself to like really interesting, good content and see what comes up, see what ideas you might have. When we are a little bit lower in energy levels, you're less inhibited. So you're going to come up with a few more ideas. So I should do my reading and like just thinking work during this time?

2:18:42You could experiment with it. At least try it. It's possible you've already trained yourself enough to like be able to still get a lot of really like to activate that central executive network that cen to get stuff done really early in the morning but probably and you'll tell me if this is true that you likely hit your peak in the evening for sure yeah that means i'm like go go go go during the night really yeah that's when you should be doing your focused work You got to get shit done. You got to be doing that stuff at night. That evening range is when people, and by the way, I'm PM shifted too.

2:19:25Women who are PM shifted are even more the minority of the human population. There's very few of us. So, but PM shifted in general, we're both minorities in the human population. So this is, we need to be taking advantage of this time. And listen, not every day, because I don't know about you, but if I stay up super late working, it's going to ruin my work day and all of this stuff. I have stuff to do during the day. I have meetings sometimes at eight o 'clock in the morning. So like, I can't do this often, but sometimes I give myself the gift of allowing myself to work in the evenings. And then when I have time to sleep in the next day, it works really well.

2:19:59I can take advantage of it and get more done. So that's what I recommend people do is really... And what do I do in the dip? Oh, administrative work. Stuff that is less important for you. We all have administrative work. Even if you outsource most of it, we still have some administrative work, like less important work. Like checking emails. Yeah. Take your calls then. Like message then. Yeah. Send all the messages, take your calls then and get that stuff done. You have some shopping to do. Do it then. Get a workout in. If you work out here during your dip, your peak will be even pickier. You're going to feel amazing.

2:20:37So many people wait until after work to go work out. Yeah. I do it in the morning. That's great. Especially for a PM shifted person. I have recommended to a lot of CEOs that are AM shifted for them to not work out in the morning. Why? Because they wake up at five. 5 AM club porn, right? They wake up at 5 AM and their brain is already on, man. It's like what your brain is like at nighttime. They're ready. They're fired. So I should work out in the morning, not at night. For you, I would say. For me too. Yeah. Because I'm not, listen, I'm not solving the world's biggest problems in the morning anyway.

2:21:15I'm like drinking my coffee. I'm like, all right. I'm like very meditative. I'm very relaxed, soft, you know. Then later in the day, I'm like, all right, let's go. Let's hit it. So yeah, my recommendation is everyone should figure out what their type is and strategically design their day when they can. Listen, we all have meetings and responsibilities, but at least know what your type is so that if you get an opportunity to protect a few hours in that peak performance window that for you is the evening, for most other people, it's going to be mid-morning. That's the majority. Some people, it's early morning.

2:21:52Protect that time. But I'm going to be anxious till 6 p.m. if I don't do like the minute I wake up and if I'm not like getting all the stuff done. Yeah. The whole day, I'm going to spend an anxiety of what am I missing out if I'm not doing the work. I won't be able to think and brainstorm and read and like, I won't be able to wander. How about if you wander, tried wandering for you schedule it and you time yourself, you say, I'm going to give myself one hour to brainstorm to see if I can come up with how many good ideas for the business and for the podcast does it does like scheduling wandering works really yeah we call it it should be what do you call it think time yeah but then shouldn't think time be just out of nowhere random then it's not disciplined then what if you never do it we're busy people i think if you really care about something you should schedule it got it interesting let me try this and then i'll tell you the results if i'm able to actually fix it or not i love it here's one thing very interesting you talk a lot about burnout right how is burnout different than anxiety or stress is it different isn't it like when you're when you're stressed all the time when you're anxious all the time you eventually burn out?

2:23:21This is such an important question. And the answer is no, they're not the same thing. But yes, if you keep stressing over and over and over again, at some point it is likely you'll burn out, but it depends on how you are experiencing that stress. So let me, let me put it this way. humans are designed we're designed to experience stress we're made for it i know people like usually these days like hate the word stress it's like a naughty word they're like everything is about anti-stress and lowering your stress and all this listen stress just means like stress hormones it just means focus alertness motivation like it's a lots of good stuff like stress is not just a bad thing.

2:24:06You need it. If you removed all the cortisol, for example, in your body, you would be in a coma. Truly, you'd be in a coma. So you need cortisol. It's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. So what is bad though? And as I mentioned, the human is designed for experiencing stress cycles. What is a stress cycle? Stress cycle is the cycle of that cortisol going up and what goes up must come down. So stress goes up, stress comes down. So we're designed for experiencing these stress cycles. Get stressed, get stressed, get stressed. Okay, and it's done. Get stressed about something and deal with it and it's done, it's over.

2:24:52You can experience this dozens of times all day. Get stressed, complete the stress cycle. what does modern life look like for so many people they wake up in the morning the alarm goes off they grab their phone because that's the alarm then they start scrolling and looking at an email and messages that have come in what's up they're just checking all the different things sending them out yes confirmed thumbs up heart yes all of these things already checking the news immediately before you've even had the opportunity to listen, right, to that internal voice. Where are my priorities? What are my goals?

2:25:34Who am I? What's the story? Where's the mindset? Do any kind of work and training on yourself. You've launched yourself onto this roller coaster ride that you didn't anticipate. And now, unfortunately, in my opinion, you've started that stress response. But what happens once you start that way? Usually people keep going until they start work. And then they start work. And then they're in their first meeting. And then the next meeting. And then more emails. And then more calls. And then this thing. And then when does it ending? It just keeps going and going and going. When are you completing the stress cycle?

2:26:08Remember what we said before. We're designed for stress cycles. Stress goes up. Stress comes down. Stress goes up. Stress comes down. It's not coming down. It's never coming down. Stress doesn't kill. Never completing the stress cycle kills. So if you never complete these stress cycles, it just keeps going up, up, up, up, up, and then you just pass out and go to sleep. And then you wake up the next morning and you just keep doing this and you're on this roller coaster ride with yourself. Eventually, yes, you'll experience burnout. Your adrenals like will finally give out and you'll be like, OK, I'm done.

2:26:43I'm done giving you cortisol.

2:26:47isn't how mostly everybody's living these days yeah and that's why listen can you imagine going back and talking to your grandfather and saying i'm burned out at your age why is it that all of a sudden everybody's burning out i met a kid a guy

2:27:1122 and a half just graduated college just started working it had been the first quarter i've a i don't i met the kid but my friend is the one who's supervising the kid he's like this guy is already saying he's burned out like clinically he's like i need to go to the doctor i'm burned out and i'm just like you just started you're i'm burned out like how could you possibly be burned out. How is that even feasible? But like right now, everyone is saying that they're experiencing this burnout. Well, first of all, I don't think they are. Clinical burnout is super serious. When people are stressed and they're anxious, sometimes they call that burnout.

2:27:48That's not the same thing. You can be stressed. It's not going to kill you. Chronic stress that never closes out for a very long time can have detrimental effects for your health for sure. So the goal is close out your stress cycles. And there's a framework that I teach in my classes and in my lab called the 3M framework for preventing burnout. What is it? It's three different kinds of breaks, breaks that everyone should be taking in order to actually prevent burnout from happening, even if you work really hard. This is, again, made for super peak performers. We developed this framework and we've tested it and it works.

2:28:34Three different kinds of breaks. Micro breaks. This is every single day for a matter of minutes you need to be taking a break. Every day for a few minutes. You can do that, right? Every week, two to four hours. Focus on the two if the four is too much. Two hours. and then every month, half day to a full day. You can focus on the half if you like. Half day off. When you put it that way, it doesn't sound that scary, right? You're like, come on, what are you talking about? A few minutes every day? I do that? Yeah. The distinction is, and this is what's critical, in order for all three of these kinds of breaks to actually be effective, biologically effective for you to actually prevent burnout, you have to employ something that we call complete psychological detachment.

2:29:31What do you mean by that? Glad you asked. You need to be the mental equivalent of off the grid. Complete psychological detachment means you're not thinking about all of the stuff that's stressing you out. You're not thinking about your deadlines. You're not thinking about necessarily if you have kids, your family, whatever, the people that is that you're responsible for. You are just mentally off. Your mind is not on all of the things. That's really hard, isn't it? So what do you do in the breaks, Anne? Well, ideally, you're just resting. But that's too hard, I think, for people. When they're resting, they're thinking about stuff.

2:30:07Exactly. Yeah. So my recommendation is to do something. Do something active that is challenging enough, active enough, so that it's impossible for you to do that thing. and be thinking about all of your stuff at the same time. Like playing something. Like hosting a podcast. Right? Like you can't tune out. We have to stay here. Otherwise we're going to... Yeah. I don't know what to ask then next. Exactly. We're just going to be like, okay, thank you for saying that. It's going to be super awkward. You're going to host the most awkward podcast in the history of time, right? You're just going to be like, oh, the host keeps like daydreaming and forgetting what he's doing and where he is, right?

2:30:47Or like if I started daydreaming, you're going to ask me a question of like, what was the question right it's not we have to we're engaged right now in something that is cognitively challenging and engaging so right now for me and you it's impossible for me to be worried about all the other stuff i know you have work later tonight so do i okay like this won't consider this won't be a break for me right because it's work right it's work obviously i'm I'm not like stressing about anything at all in this particular moment, but before and after I will. Yes. So this is it. For these four hours, I'm just going to be like, I don't care about the world at all.

2:31:27Well, then in that case, I would oddly maybe consider this a break for you because you're in flow, at least. Absolutely. Your DA, right? Yeah, the watchtower. It's here. We're not letting anything else take us away. So I would actually imagine for you and actually for me too, we're both in flow. So for this few hours, I've allowed myself to stop worrying about everything else and just be here present in this conversation with you. Now, for most other people, they're not hosting a podcast or not on a podcast. Okay. So what can you do? If you're going to do a workout to de-stress, do a workout that is different, hard enough, novel.

2:32:14A lot of people I know go on runs. Don't go on the same run every single day because you're going to go on autopilot and just tune out. You're going to be like on the run and you know exactly where you're going every single time. So it's going to be too easy if you do the same exact workout every single time. So change it up, mix it up, make it novel so that your brain goes, oh, hold on a second. Where are we? What are we doing? And when it does that, you can't think about anything else. You have to be present. I like to cook. I love food. So I like to cook. Okay. So when I'm cooking, if I make the same recipes that I've made hundreds of times, I can be worrying and thinking while I'm chopping my vegetables, doing all the things, right?

2:32:55Easy. But if I do something I've never done before, new crazy recipe, totally different, and now I have to focus. I have to put the baggage down. My watchtower needs to be right here. I can't be anywhere else. That's what I want people to find. The mental equivalent of off the grid. This thing is quieted down and you're focused on something else. Immersed. Pick up a hobby. Like force yourself. Seriously, force yourself. I'll tell you why hobbies are really important. Like active hobbies that are new and challenging. Like you're learning a new skill. learned how to play the harmonica. I'm learning by that, by the way.

2:33:35Maybe next time I see you bring a harmonica. Or for example, whatever, hacky sack, just something silly, juggling. You could learn how to juggle. You could pick a hobby for yourself and say, I'm going to force myself. Seriously, you don't actually have to be interested. It could be by force for burnout. You could be like, listen, I'm just a high performance junkie, but I'm worried about burnout. Okay. Then you have to force yourself to have some other hobby because that's a part of your peak performance. Interesting. You force yourself to have the hobby and then you immerse yourself in it because it's hard.

2:34:07So if I want to learn how to play the guitar, it's going to take all of my energy and mind in that moment. I get a YouTube, you know, like video playing and the guy's like teaching me what to do. And I'm like doing the things. I'm not thinking about anything else. I have to be right there. So that's, those are my recommendations. Every day for a few minutes, you have to go mentally off the grid. What do you mean by few? 15, 20? Sure. This is different for every person, so I can't give, but I would say at least 10. Okay. 10 minutes even. So 10 minutes a day. Yeah. Then two hours a week. And half day a month.

2:34:46And what do you call them? 3M? Why do you call it 3M framework? Micro, mezzo, and macro breaks. Easy to remember. Micro break, mezzo break, and a macro break. Three different kinds of breaks. You did a research, right, recently about people who were stressed, anxious, lonely, depressed, and then you did something about them in nine weeks. Yes. And then you saw miraculous results. What was it? This is currently unpublished. So you're like the first to hear about this right now. I was literally looking at this data last night. It's kind of amazing. I don't know how to describe it. I'm very excited.

2:35:30Okay. What is it? Okay. I started teaching a class at UC Berkeley for undergraduates, so for younger people, called Mind, Machine, and Meaning. This class is a living experiment, meaning instead of just learning about things in the class, I'm asking the students to change their behavior. new habits we're breaking habits and building new ones so we're actually going through behavior change and neuroplasticity while the class is happening fascinating hard work okay class of 450 and you're actually making them go through neuroplasticity yeah each one of them it'll be different for each one of them yeah okay what is it and we're tracking it all we're doing research on the students.

2:36:20So we actually asked the students at the beginning of the class, sign up for science. Let's do this. Come into the lab and we're going to test your attention span. We're going to test your complex working memory. We're going to test your loneliness. We're going to test your meaning and life satisfaction. We're going to test your depression, your anxiety, your stress levels. We're going to test all these things. Then we're going to go through a nine-week digital detox. You're going to change your relationship with scrolling, the binging, the short-form media. I tell them the same thing we talked about today.

2:37:01Long-form could be fine. We had, you know, for homework one week, everyone had to watch a movie without a second screen. That's homework in my class. This week, you have to watch a movie. minimum 90 minutes they could also watch your podcast what a privileged class you are in well we're but we're doing the hard work i'm telling you because it's become hard it's like we were talking about before right with netflix you're telling me for younger kids it's harder to watch a movie yeah they can't sit through a 90 minute movie no even if it's a good movie to me at least i'm like this is crazy i'm like completely like engrossed in the thing but it's not their fault it's because this the short form is so it's the candy imagine if you're addicted to candy and what you're saying is by the way do you have like a delicious favorite meal yeah so many what like give me like one example pick up any like i said mapu tofu i love it so good so good okay like a good one like okay so that has a lot of nutrition right it's going to fill you up right the tofu is also lots of protein and it's good stuff right yeah if you were addicted to candy and it's not your fault right because it's in your pocket the candy is always in your pocket for some reason and it's always in your hand and you get hungry you're supposed to you're eating now you're addicted to candy do you think people who are addicted to junk food and candy like maputofu not at all no even i won oh no exactly there you go so that's why so the movie is totally hard work for them.

2:38:34So we have them go through this nine week digital detox. We have them change their relationship with scrolling. We have them put limits on how much they can scroll. We have them do it in such a way that if they go over the limit, it's going to send a text message to one of their friends. And I find out too, we all find out. So it like keeps them social accountability, right? And because remember, if you take away your coping mechanism for stress, Because for most people, they're scrolling because they're stressed out. And it's become a coping mechanism. They're numbing. If you take that away from them, they're going to feel even worse.

2:39:12They're going to have to sit with those negative feelings and it feels really, really bad. So we also brought in a therapist to teach them emotional regulation, healthier emotional regulation techniques and strategies. Then we also had other people who have been through serious digital addiction come and tell their stories. that's what was happening in class they were getting the inspiration what did you call the high quality content bloom bloom scrolling yeah bloom scrolling we taught them about the content diet and we said you need to make your doom scrolling into bloom scrolling change stop following all of these shit accounts that don't teach you anything they don't challenge you they don't expose you to new ideas now i want you to actually go in and think about like find new accounts, talk to each other, do research, which accounts are going to actually level you up and all the whatever in and everybody's different.

2:40:05You know, some of the students are really into like art, some of them are into they want to start a business, they're all over the place, right? For you and your niche, go find the bloom, seek the bloom. Then we're also making sure that they in general have less screen time. And we are replacing the digital connection with real in-person connection. We threw a party, huge party, food, games, the whole thing, live music. People went on hikes. We set up the students on blind dates. What kind of class is this? The best class. Actually, no, it was a whole lot of hard work. The class is a study. It's research.

2:40:50I want to see, and I know we can do this, But now I have the data to back it up that people, especially young people, do not have to be as isolated and lonely, as depressed and anxious. And their attention spans do not need to be as shot as they are. Neuroplasticity is real. Neuroplasticity is real. That means that whatever we did, we did something to make this happen. You can undo it. It's like muscles, right? I can eat and never move and something's going to happen for sure to my body. Or I can force myself to eat good food and exercise and then other things are going to happen to my body. But what were the results?

2:41:33Like what happened then? Like you, at the beginning of the class, you got their attention and like you tested a bunch of things. Then you did all of this, made it fun. Yes. What happened then? It was also hard. A lot of tears, by the way. I had a lot of students crying. it was really difficult because it's an addiction. Everyone is going through withdrawal together. If I have 450 people, we are all experiencing withdrawal together at the same time. We're just trying to make it better by injecting connection and play. I forced everybody for the final project, you have to pick up a hobby and work on it throughout the semester.

2:42:11So this was what we did. And for nine weeks, they were not allowed to touch their phones. No, no, no, no, no. They all had their phones. They just scrolled a little bit less. specifically also short form media. That was what I said, social media and the scrolling. We're going to doom scroll a little less. Watch a movie, watch long YouTube videos, watch other stuff, you know? And by the way, they still scrolled. They just scrolled a little less. So if someone was doing for two hours, they did it for like 30 minutes. Exactly. Some of them were doing it for six hours and then they brought it down to like two.

2:42:39Okay. Awesome. Okay. Then what happened? After nine weeks, scores showed significantly less lonely, significantly less depressed, significantly less anxious. Their attention spans went up significantly. Their complex working memory, which is a proxy for general fluid intelligence, significantly increased. It's almost unbelievable when I look at the results myself. I didn't think it was going to be this good, to be honest with you. I knew my intuition told me as a scientist who's been working with people about this topic for a long time that we were going to see some benefits. I didn't realize we were going to see this many benefits so fast.

2:43:23And by the way, they came in at the beginning of the semester when everybody just came back from break and they were all feeling good. And when I had them do the after test after nine weeks, they were in the middle of midterms. So they were all super stressed out. Seriously. And even though they were during midterms, the results were still that uplifting and inspiring. But wouldn't the results be somewhat biased as well? Because I've gone through such thing nine weeks, I'm just going to tick all the good things in a survey, right? Well, you can't really gamify your attention span. That's a digital assessment.

2:44:00Those cognitive assessments, you can't really game. Sure, I guess you could lie for some reason. Yeah, let's say I can say I'm less lonely, whatever. Sure, it is possible to lie, but why would you? It's all anonymous. There's no benefit. If anything, the thing that I was worried students would do, especially during midterms, is just answer so fast that they're not even paying attention to the answers. They're just like, because it's anonymous. I don't want to make them feel like they have to answer a certain way because you're right, then as a professor, they're going to be like, oh, I need to say these things.

2:44:36Yeah. But then attention span, like through the device you found out, like it just improved? We have a test of attention that we do. It's a cognitive assessment. These are things I can test you on too, if you ever want to, you come to my lab at Berkeley and we'll get you fully tested. Complex working memory, visual memory, attention span, the whole thing. Okay. But you sit down and these are digital assessments that you do. So there's no, I'm not asking you anything. I'm actually testing it. Can you focus on this boring thing and how long can you go before you make a mistake and miss something.

2:45:08And their scores improved in nine weeks, even though they were more stressed because it's now exam time. So just, you're really making short form Devon. I'm making it candy. And I have a sweet tooth like you do. I still eat candy, but eat the mapu tofu first you know like don't fill up on the candy ice ice scroll be the first to admit on your show i'm going to tell the world the anti-scrolling lady i scroll but i have limits on it you know like and i ask yourself the question how much time is it worth it for you to give of your life, your precious life to scrolling every day. I'm not saying don't do it.

2:46:0010 minutes is good. Maybe 10 minutes of scrolling. And I'm not even saying that's all of your media. If you want to sit down and watch good quality YouTube videos for like, I don't know, 20, 30 minutes, like learn something, right? You could do, okay, I want to do at least half an hour of that. I want to like, I have these accounts I'm following bloom. I want to bloom scroll a little bit on these, but like long form content that's actually challenging your mind that you remember you're learning something. You can pause the video and go look something up. These kinds of things, as opposed to the doom.

2:46:36Interesting. I heard the moment you were saying how much of the time you're going to do this, I'm hearing how much of the time you're going to invest in becoming dumbo, in becoming lonelier in becoming less empathetic in becoming in making your memory worse all of these things at the same time here's the last thing I ask everybody when were you the most powerless or anxious in your life?

2:47:21I would say for me, when I was struggling with addiction, I felt powerless. And man, it felt like a cruel joke from the universe. I study addiction. I study neuroplasticity. I study this stuff. And somehow I got tricked. You know, it's not really a trick. It's biology. It's science, but it's humbling. And I think it's an important message because people need to know that everybody, we're all human. Everybody's susceptible. It's about the choices we make. It's about awareness and being intentional about how you spend your time and also what you do with your life, what you choose to ingest, what you choose to think.

2:48:15Be careful about what you expose your mind to. What were you addicted to? I've been addicted to a great number of things in my life. I have been addicted to, I've smoked, I've drank, I've done scrolling, sugar, you name it. But it has been my life's most, you know what's interesting? I love the word you used, powerless. From what felt like the most powerless moment in my life, it gave rise to the most powerful feelings I've ever had in my entire life. I feel unstoppable and so powerful because of overcoming addiction. So it was an opportunity. So now when you feel powerless again, what's your personal framework to become powerful?

2:49:22Well, this one is going to maybe sound even a little bit spiritual. I have a few beliefs. One of my beliefs is that the universe and the world is not how it seems. That a great amount of my reality is a construct of my own mind, which means I can influence the world and my life through what's happening in here. So I protect this thing. I protect it by not letting bad stuff in. I audit what it's doing and what it's thinking. And if I'm ever feeling powerless, I remind myself that I am God. I am all powerful. I create everything in my life. Because you can, you truly can. You can create your own reality, your consciousness, like literally, truly, my conscious experience, if I close my eyes right now, and so do you, you can dream a reality inside of your mind now you might say but but that's not real it's in your mind but when something is truly real in your mind it's real for you so much research has also shown us that when you rehearse something and you visualize it you daydream you daydream about it that the brain can barely tell the difference between daydreaming about x and actually doing X.

2:50:46True. So if you're ever feeling powerless, you go into a daydream where you are the most powerful person in the world. Go into that daydream because then all of a sudden you're going to start to feel more powerful again. Nice. Here is the last question, which is we always ask people about cost of ambition, right? So what's the cost? What's the cost you have personally paid to become the person who you are today? What's the cost of becoming this top level scientist, researcher, business woman, running 50 things at the same time and researching and probably telling the world about something that they don't believe in?

2:51:29What's the cost of all of this? My family and friends know the cost because they see it. There is always a cost. So I'm so glad you asked people this question. I have been relentless and very focused in my life on building what I want to build and doing what I want to do. It doesn't allow for a lot of space for distraction. But the thing is, I've also sacrificed a lot of fun. I've sacrificed personal travel, vacations, leisure, scrolling. I avoided getting social media, by the way, just until recently. Completely avoided it. I have given up friendships. I've lost friendships. I've lost a lot of very important relationships in my life because of my hyper focus on prioritizing work.

2:52:34Addictions, as I've mentioned before, that all comes out of this relentless ambition and relentless drive towards performance. And yeah, I've nearly lost my life and given my life, I will say that, in the pursuit of my goals. and that amount of sacrifice, I can't say I regret it because even though regretful things have happened because of it, I'm happy with where I'm at today, not just from a success metric perspective, but I learned and now I can teach and I've corrected. And now I prioritize the people in my life, the most important people. I'm like extremely community oriented. And there's people around my loved ones are around me all the time and I'm around them.

2:53:29And it's completely shifted what I sacrificed and the negative side effects, I would say, what I lost, I've learned from it, which is all we can do, right? Thank you for sharing that. Thank you so much for spending time with us and teaching us about brain and productivity and cognitive things we have missed one very important topic we need to do that next time which are the 10 laws we will do that how can a human being become a superhuman we will go through it and we will do that next podcast so thank you so much thank you and to many more podcasts together many more podcasts together cheers done cheers

2:54:20No, we are here just purely for work. Don't care about fun at least for the next two, three years. Really? Oh, yes. Are you sure? Oh, absolutely. Just whatever makes more sense in terms of impact maximization, you know.

2:54:49and make every episode a little better. I'll see you next time. Until then keep figuring out.