How to Make Life Exciting Again

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1:37Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. And if you're out there and you want to learn more about how to create the perfect morning routine, I created a free video and workbook at theperfectmorningroutine.com. You can go ahead and download it so that you can learn based off of science how you can create the perfect morning routine and a checklist to help you check off the boxes to get it done. Once again, theperfectmorningroutine.com. Today we're going to be talking about something that I think almost every single person listening to this is probably struggling with, even if you don't realize it yet.

2:13And it's this, your brain is overstimulated as hell. And because of that, life doesn't feel the same anymore. Food doesn't taste the same. Music doesn't feel the same that it used to. Conversations don't feel as deep. Your goals don't excite you like they used to. You pick up your phone without even realizing it and you scroll for 20 minutes and somehow then you feel worse. And then most people, what do they think after that? Think, oh, well, I'm just lazy or maybe I'm depressed or maybe I've just lost my passion for life or maybe there's something wrong with me. And the truth is there might not be anything wrong with you.

2:51You might actually just be overstimulated. Your brain might be so flooded with dopamine hits throughout the entire day that it has novelty and notifications and fast content and sugar and caffeine and scrolling and video games and porn and multitasking and constant input so that your normal life literally does not feel exciting anymore. And so your nervous system never really gets a rest. Your attention is constantly moving and going from one thing to another all day long and your brain never really gets a moment to chill. In boredom, which is just basically a complete lack of input, is actually one of the most important things that you can do for your own creativity, for your peace, for your joy, and for your motivation.

3:43And so today I want to dive deep into how to dopamine detox, how to get past all of the overstimulation, why your life actually feels dull, what social media is actually doing to your brain, how to reset your nervous system, and also how to make simple life feel beautiful again. Because I want you to understand this, the goal is not to feel excited and hyped up all of the time. The goal is to feel truly alive, no matter what you're doing in life, even if it's nothing. So let's be real for just a second. I want to tell you how I got here and why this episode is important to me. About three or four years ago, I noticed that life started to feel really dull.

4:24And nothing was like wrong in my life. I wasn't like there wasn't a big event that made it feel this way. But it was like nothing was really exciting. And I think I live a pretty amazing life. And my life is awesome. And I get to travel. I get great experiences. but like it was like the life I was living it was like the saturation and all of the colors had been like turned down and I wasn't like depressed I just like wasn't excited like I wasn't excited about all of the travel and the experiences and I would get to a country I'd never been to before and see an amazing sunset and I'd be like oh that's cool but it wasn't like exciting to me anymore and I thought like this isn't good like what's what's wrong with me like what's going on in me being who I am, I was like, what's going on in my nervous system?

5:10What's going on in my brain? And how do I actually fix this? And the truth of all of this is that we all have to realize that there has never been a human in all of history before us whose brain had to process as much stimulation as ours do every single day. Never. Your ancestors didn't wake up to alarms and emails and TikTok and Netflix and drink caffeine and listen to podcasts at 2x speed and send text messages to six different people and then consume political outrage and then watch porn and play video games and eat hyper-processed foods and then wonder why they feel anxious and numb. They never had to deal with that like we do.

5:50Your nervous system evolved for nature where everything is slower and more calm. And the problem is that your brain adapts to whatever environment you repeatedly place it in. And that's one of the most important things to understand about neuroscience is that your brain is constantly adapting. So if you constantly feed it intense stimulation, fast dopamine spikes, novelty and speed and scrolling and negativity and video games and instant gratification, your brain starts expecting that level of stimulation all of the time, which means that everything that is not that level of stimulation feels boring as hell to you.

6:32and then your normal life actually just feels boring. Watching your beautiful, amazing children play feels boring. It doesn't feel exciting to you because your dopamine baseline has been changed. And so let's talk about dopamine real quick. I talk about dopamine often with you guys, so I'm gonna just fly through this part, but it's important to cover in case you're new here. Dopamine is the chemical that is tied to motivation, anticipation, seeking, craving, pursuit, all of that. It's basically the chemical that says, go get that thing. And so dopamine isn't bad. You need dopamine. It's very important.

7:11You need it to pursue your goals. You need it to fall in love. You need it to build a business. You need it to work out, to create art, to survive. You need it. So the issue is not dopamine. The issue is artificial dopamine overload. See, your brain has what researchers call homeostasis. Your brain always wants to seek balance. So when you repeatedly overstimulate your dopamine system, your brain compensates by lowering your sensitivity, which means that the more stimulation that you consume, the less pleasure you will get from normal life, which is why scrolling can feel better than reading, why eating junk food can be more exciting than healthy food.

7:53Why short form content on social media makes conversations with a normal person in front of your face feel slow. And then your brain starts getting trained to like need more and more and more and more stimulation to feel the same level of excitement. This is actually called dopamine desensitization. And researchers have been studying this extensively in the past few years because of how many people are starting to feel like normal life just isn't exciting to them anymore. Dr. Anna Lemke from Stanford talks about this extensively. She does a lot of work on dopamine and addiction. She explains that the brain is constantly balancing between pleasure and pain.

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11:20New customers on first three month plan only. Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. And now, back to the show. And when we overload ourselves with pleasure stimuli, what's crazy about it is that the brain compensates by pushing us towards pain. So like numbness, irritability, anxiety, dissatisfaction. Which is why after binge scrolling or binge watching something, you often feel worse, not better. And this is the crazy part. Most people think they need more stimulation because they feel numb. But the overstimulation is the reason why they feel numb in the first place.

12:08And so your brain is essentially losing its ability to enjoy simple things. Like, have you ever noticed this? Like you'll scroll for, I don't know, 45 minutes. And then you'll try to sit quietly for five minutes. And you feel like crawling out of your own skin, it can feel so uncomfortable to do nothing, can't it? Think about that for a second. Like if you really think about it, you're doing nothing, nothing. Why would nothing feel uncomfortable? That doesn't make any sense if you actually think about it, right? Why? Because your nervous system has been conditioned for intensity, like silence starts to feel uncomfortable stillness feels like something is wrong and so your brain starts craving another hit it's basically like a drug addict another video another snack another text message another scroll another refresh of social media another dopamine spike and this is why people like today say oh i can't focus oh i just have problem with my focus no you probably don't have an attention problem.

13:19You probably don't have a focus problem. It's just that your attention has been fragmented. You have unconsciously trained yourself to be distracted all day, every day. Your brain has been trained to switch every eight seconds to a new thing. And there's actual research on this. Studies actually show that excessive digital stimulation and multitasking impair your attention span. It messes with your working memory. It messes with your cognitive control. And so your brain becomes conditioned for shallow stimulation over like real depth of what's going on in your life and being deep in your life.

14:01And the truth is depth is like where your meaning truly lives. Overstimulation destroys your depth. And so let's talk about how to actually do a dopamine detox, like what it means. When people hear like dopamine detox, they like think like, what am I supposed to just enjoy nothing? Am I supposed to never enjoy anything? No, no, no. That's not the point. The point is not removing dopamine from your life. In fact, that's literally impossible to do. The point is reducing the artificial overstimulation long enough so that your brain can actually recalibrate your baseline in dopamine. That's You're trying to lower the noise so that your nervous system can remember what it feels like to just be normal again.

14:45And I mean, phones have been out and social media has been out for so long that it's been 10, 15 years until since most people actually been back to normal, right? You're trying to let your dopamine receptors recover. You're trying to make normal, boring life vivid again. It's like someone blasting music directly into the ears 24-7. Eventually, you just stop hearing the music. And so what happens when you de-stimulate your brain? Well, this is what's really beautiful about your brain. So when you start reducing stimulation in your brain, your focus improves. Your conversations with another human in front of you feel deeper and more meaningful.

15:28Music sounds better. Nature actually feels more calming and relaxing to you. Your creativity that you haven't seen in years comes back. Your motivation returns. Food tastes better. Simple things start feeling meaningful again. Some people who are younger have never felt that. Some people haven't felt that in 15 years. And so you know what starts happening? You can actually start enjoying your existence again. And honestly, I think that's one of the saddest things about modern life is that people have lost their ability to enjoy just a ordinary moment because their nervous system is just so addicted to go, go, go, go, go.

16:09And the modern world that we live in is an attention war zone. Attention. Everybody wants your attention. You need to realize this. your attention is being fought over every single second. There are multi-billion dollar companies hiring neuroscience and behavioral psychologists specifically to keep you addicted to your phone. That's not a conspiracy theory. That is reality. Now, social media apps are literally engineered around intermittent reward systems, the same psychology mechanisms that are used in slot machines. So you refresh and refresh and refresh. Oh, maybe I'll get something exciting.

16:45Maybe it'll be something good. Maybe not. And then your brain keeps checking again and again and again and again. And over time, your nervous system never gets to rest, which is why people can feel like exhausted by doing nothing physically. Your brain's tired. Your nervous system is exhausted. Your mind is just carrying way too much input. You need to remove yourself from their game. You're just a character in their game. You need to remove yourself from it. So here's the problem that a lot of people don't really talk about. Most people don't know who they are without all the stimulation. It's been so long since they have not been fully stimulated all the time.

17:26Or they've been being fully stimulated all the time since they were 10 years old. And now 15 years later, they're 25. And they're like, I don't know who the fuck I am without being on my phone all the time. And so the hard truth is like for a lot of these people, like silence feels uncomfortable because the moment everything gets quiet, you finally hear yourself. You hear your fears. You hear your insecurities. You hear your traumas, your unresolved emotions, your anxiety, your loneliness. So people stay stimulated, not necessarily because they enjoy it, but because distraction feels safer than self-awareness.

18:00And this, for those of you guys listening, is where your real work begins. Because when you remove the noise, you meet yourself. and that can be really uncomfortable at first, but that's where your healing is gonna start. And so let's talk about how to actually stimulate, like de-stimulate your brain, okay? I wanna get practical for you. How do you actually reset your brain and your nervous system? First thing, you've heard me say this so many times in the podcast, but number one is stop consuming content first thing in the morning. Please listen to me and stop waking up and immediately flooding your nervous system.

18:32No phone for 90 minutes, no scrolling, no emails, no TikTok, no news. Your brain just woke up. Like, let it chill for a second. Give it some space. Go outside. Get in nature. Put your feet on the ground. Get some sun. Breathe. Journal. Sit quietly. Meditate. Whatever it is you need to do. Drink water. Like, let your brain enter the day slowly. Because when you wake up, your cortisol is already at the highest that it will be all day long when you wake up. Don't spike it even more. Allow 90 minutes for that cortisol to drop. Start the day slow. Because most people just like wake up and immediately put their nervous system in survival mode.

19:12So that's number one. Number two, schedule boredom in your life. Yes, it sounds weird, but boredom is really important. Boredom is where creativity returns. If boredom is hard for you, doing nothing, like nothing is hard for you, is because you're addicted to stimuli the way that a drug addict is addicted to their drug. Some of your best ideas are not going to happen while scrolling. When do best ideas happen? They happen when you're walking, when you're driving without music, when you're in the shower, when you're just staring out the window because your brain finally has room to think. Your brain needs kind of like that white space for new ideas to come through.

19:55So that's number two. Number three, reduce dopamine stacking. Let me explain what I mean by this. This is really huge. A lot of people unconsciously stack stimulation constantly all day long. Caffeine and scrolling and listening to music and being on your phone while watching TV or lots of sugar or multitasking or notifications or eating and having to always have YouTube up. Your brain never settles. So try doing one thing at a time and try to bring all five of your senses to feel and smell and taste and see what's going on in that moment. Eat without your phone. Walk without a podcast. Drive without constant simulation.

20:40You know, take a shit without scrolling. Like, dude, come on. Like, give your nervous system a rest, right? Let your nervous system breathe. There's research that shows that even a few minutes of silence can reduce your cortisol. And then that helps reduce and regulate your nervous system. Stillness is the medicine for the overstimulated brain. And I know some people hate silence. And if you do, that's usually the biggest sign that you actually need it. And then number four, relearn how to enjoy slow things like read books, cook a meal, have a long conversation without your phone or the TV on, watch a sunset without taking a photo, Go for a walk with no phone.

21:23Work out and don't check your phone the entire time. Train your brain to just enjoy depth again because your life expands wherever your attention goes. So you don't need more excitement. You just need less noise. You know, people are constantly searching for another dopamine hit, another vacation, another purchase, another distraction, thinking like, oh, maybe this will make me feel something. The truth is you don't need life to become more stimulating. You need your nervous system to become less overloaded and life will automatically feel more exciting. And so I want you to remember this. If your life feels boring right now, it doesn't mean that life is boring.

21:59It means that your brain may have lost sensitivity to normal life. And the beautiful part, you can get it back. You can retrain your brain. You can return your nervous system to normal. You can reset your dopamine baseline. You can make ordinary life feel amazing again. Because really it requires something that most people avoid, which is slowing down in more stillness. And honestly, that might be the medicine that your brain has been begging you for this entire time. So I want to challenge you for this week. Spend more time bored. Spend less time stimulated. Stop reaching for your phone every single empty second.

22:37because your brain is not a machine. It's like a living, breathing nervous system. And sometimes the most productive thing that you can do is nothing. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me in at RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And if you love this podcast, you would probably love downloading the free guide that I gave you on how to create the perfect morning routine. Once again, it is theperfectmorningroutine.com. You can download it for free. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode.

23:10Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.

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