Is Your Phone Killing Your Creativity? 3 Ways to Boost Brain Health | Tj Power

0:00Welcome to Live Well, Be Well, a show to help high performers improve their health and wellbeing.

0:10I've become quite interested in this area of the brain since speaking to Robin Schwama, who came on recently. And I went away to Austria to write the last part of my book recently on a solo trip. And it was amazing because I was surrounded and immersed in nature. And I had to physically remove myself from my work environment and put myself in the middle of nature and have to train myself every day to get up and go out for a walk, not take my phone, disconnect and just be around greenery. And I have to say, I worked harder than ever before. Well, that's maybe an extreme statement. I worked extremely hard.

0:46I was working kind of 15 hours a day on just writing, which is quite intense. But my aura ring and my know watch were like two trackers that I wear were saying that I was more restored than ever. Oh, cool. And I found that really interesting. One, because I wasn't like crossing my tasks. I was really trying to be like checking in with work, but being very boundary with my work and just using hyperfocus. But I was also immersed in nature, immersed in greenery. A huge benefit to that. And I wasn't switching. My brain wasn't switching constantly. I was just in the zone. And I was like, wow, I've done really extreme work hours because I had to do it over four days, but my HRV is higher than it's been all year.

1:27Wow, you must have felt calm then. I felt extremely calm and really clear. And then I was like, why don't I integrate this more into my life? So can you just talk a little bit about the kind of power of the default mode network and the connection that it has to when you do switch off from switching tasks and being more in nature, like just how this impacts our creativity and motivation? Yeah, so as a massive dopamine addict, boredom is not a nice place. It's a learning, it's like a working progress, but it's really hard, like stillness. And I have a cousin who's about 10 years older than me, and he's been super inspiring to me in lots of ways throughout my life.

2:05And he's quite like a proper hippie living in Australia, like next level of where maybe people would want to go, but he does have lots of good insights to share with me. and one time I went to his house and he told me he likes to sit on the sofa and think and I thought you're a crazy person like why would you want to do that like to me that sounded like hell when he said that to me just like to sit on a sofa with no objective but to just like be in your head and it like led me down a path like what could come from that world because often what guidance he's given me has led to good outcomes so I'm like okay so now I've got to explore the idea that I've got to enjoy to some level sitting on a sofa doing nothing.

2:45And he sent me this challenge that we called meals, bedroom, bathroom, where I wasn't allowed to look at a screen when I was eating a meal, when I was in my bedroom or when I was going to the bathroom or having a bath. And that was a super difficult challenge for me. Like the meals component, for 10 years, I watched YouTube whilst eating. Even sometimes as shameful as it is to say, like a lot of time, even with my partner, I'd be like, let's watch this YouTube video. And then we'd like watch dinner. like eat dinner in front of YouTube. And then the bedroom one, no screens in the bedroom, as we've shared, is very tricky.

3:16And then bathroom, it's very easy to get into the habitual nature of just like taking your phone to the bathroom with you all the time, or like sitting in the bath, always on your phone. And throughout that period of time, it gave me this big opportunity to like, okay, what is boredom doing for my brain? And for anyone listening, I do think meals, bedroom, bathroom is like a good phrase to consider. Like, could they try for a number of days, meals, bedroom and bathroom without screens? When you come to this default network, against the executive network. When we're like really engaged and we're doing something or we're very present in a specific activity that's quite cognitively stimulating, our executive network will activate.

3:52And it's a very useful network. Like it's very useful to be able to work deeply on a project, for example, or to engage in a task or engage in a conversation. Very useful. On the other side, we have our default mode network, which will have the capacity to reflect more. And some people can say like there's challenges with the default mode network with things like rumination. We can ruminate on our worries a little bit in the default mode network. But there's also a huge amount of power in reflection. And when we're presented in life with hard decisions to make, like career changes, relationship stuff, decisions around our health, typically they require quite significant amounts of reflection to make good decisions.

4:32And often you see that individuals that spend time in the default network, like they intentionally try and go towards boredom. they begin to make better decisions because they begin to deeply think through challenges in their life rather than sort of like impulsively making decisions. Like when we're on our phone, it's executive network, executive network. And then it might be like, well, I need to think about that thing for a sec. Don't really want to think about it. Just like make a very quick decision on it and then go forward. In that boredom, in that default network, not only do we make good decisions, amazing like creative answers to either problems or just like solutions in work begin to appear.

5:07And for me, like for example, something for me that's really hard is to go to nature and just lie on the grass and do nothing. Sounds like a lovely thing to do, but it is not lovely in my mind. Like my brain's just too stimulated, but I know that's going towards the default mode network, towards just like reflection. And I find the more I do it, the better decisions I make, the more creative I am, the better ideas I generate with my content and my lab, with what we're like going forward with our different work areas. So it's an important place to go towards, not away from. And even if you're a dopamine addict, like if you're a very hyper-stimulated person, there is a world after a number of years of like gradually moving towards it with things like meals, bedroom, bathroom.

5:44There's a world where it is actually a nice experience, but it just takes time. I think it's just the self-awareness kind of around all of this. And I think it's so important. The meals, bedroom, bathroom is great. The phone out of your room, activating in nature. I think also just like being disciplined and allowing yourself to know that boredom is an act of creativity, I think is an important message in a world that's so driven towards productivity. That is so key. Can I add one thing on that? Because the word boredom has a slightly negative bias in our mind of like, I don't want to be bored.

6:19I've started consciously calling it daydreaming in my mind because daydreaming is a slightly nicer idea. And at school, I was also told not to daydream. So, you know, I'm happy to now do it. but if you kind of sit there and you're like i'm gonna just try and daydream like try and get into that like trance type state where your vision almost goes blurry you know like you get like inside just like you're in a trance you just daydream that is so restful for the brain now like that is so restorative and something we're just not experiencing like every time we have a second to wait it's like where's the phone where's stimulation and on the train for example i'd always that just like, and now I'm trying to like daydream out the window to try and restore the brain.

6:58And it's super powerful. And like, if I nail my phone the whole train home or I daydream, when I get home, like my mental health is so different. Thanks so much for listening. To hear the full episode, there's a link in the description.