This Is Why Your Brain Feels So Exhausted

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1:41Welcome 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're trying to perfect your morning routine, I just created a simple workbook for you to download that shows you the step-by-step process to create an amazing morning routine based in science. If you want to download it for free, you can go to theperfectmorningroutine.com and get it now. Today, I'm going to be talking to you about how overstimulation is ruining your life. Let's get real for a second.

2:16If you feel like maybe you're a little bit drained recently, or maybe your brain's a little bit all over the place, you feel kind of scattered, or you feel tired and numb, or you just kind of feel like you're not really yourself, I want you to know that there's a chance that you're not broken. There's a chance that you're not lazy. There's a chance that you're not unmotivated or that you're a loser. There's a chance that you could be extremely overstimulated with the current world that we live in. And it's quietly starting to wreck your ability to focus, to connect with other people, and a lot of times to even feel the feelings of joy.

2:55And so today we're going to take a deep dive into what overstimulation actually is when you look at it neurologically, how it's affecting you in your life, the psychology and the neuroscience behind being overstimulated, how it actually affects your brain, how it affects your body, how it affects your relationships, and affects the way that you feel. And then most importantly, what the hell you can do about it so that you can get rid of that overstimulation so that you can go back to feeling yourself and having the vibrance and the energy that you actually truly have. It's just being kind of stolen away from you.

3:28So when you look at overstimulation, I was really curious before we dive into it, like what is overstimulation based off what we're going to be talking about today? Overstimulation is what happens when your brain and your nervous system, and your nervous system is a really key part of what we're going to be talking about today. are exposed to more sensory, emotional, and informational input than they can effectively process in one point in time and then be able to regulate. Because you have to understand your brain is processing everything that comes in and it's filtering what it needs to pay attention to, what it does need to pay attention to.

4:05And so over time, your body needs to be able to regulate all this. And so it can leave you scattered. It can leave you exhausted because your brain's working a million miles a second behind everything. It can make you feel a little bit emotionally numb. It can make you feel irritable as well. Basically, overstimulation is what happens when your brain takes in more information that it can actually process. And you've heard me say this before, but just really think about this. If you think back to your great, great, great, great grandparents, what 150 years ago maybe life was completely different they didn't have phones they didn't have tvs they didn't have radios they didn't have cars running or going all the place they didn't have airplanes like it was just completely different our brain has not caught up to adapt to all of the changes that have happened the past 150 years so you can think about your mind being like this old computer.

5:04You remember like the green screen computers that you used to have for those of you guys that are older, like the green screen ones that were very basic. Think of your mind being like one of those, but it's got 150 tabs open. It's got music playing. It's got downloads running in the background. It's got pop-ups flashing, limited time offer. That's your brain basically what it's dealing with all of the time. And your brain can't process everything. It's trying to. There's no software update for your brain. There's no hardware update for your brain. What you got is what you got. And so, you know, modern life feels like that.

5:41It feels like nonstop notifications, 24-7 news, constant background noise, whether that's people talking or whether that's car sounds, whether that's the TV on in the background, whether that's music playing, whether that's people in the background. You're getting dopamine hits from social media, getting cortisol from all of the worries that you're thinking about in the future, and your brain's on high alert all day long, every single day. It just was not designed for this. So if you're one of those people who feels like, man, like I just have no energy. I'm exhausted all the time. I'm tired. I'm a little bit irritable.

6:14It might be that your brain needs a freaking break because your brain wasn't built for it. And over the thousands of years that it's evolved, our brain's more used to natural, gradual, slow changes in the environment. Not TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Slack, phone notifications, email inboxes, text messages, and DMs, and group chats from your friends, and Instagram, and podcasts, and having a to-do list that will never be finished, having unfinished tasks, worrying about things coming up in the future, your perfectionism, what people are thinking about you, what they're not thinking about you, your self-criticism, the voice that's going on in the back of your head all the time.

6:55And then you're in a meeting with your boss. And then at the same time, you also see the TV has breaking news about some crazy thing that just happened in instant drama and constant urgency. It's way too much, man. And so there's tens of thousands of distractions every single day. And I'm not being sarcastic when I actually say tens of thousands. I had to do research of like how many distractions and things are coming into our brain throughout the entire course of the day. And here's what I've found, right? There's a lot of research on this. Research shows that modern humans are processing way more than we can, like trying to process way more than we can every single day.

7:30You know, when you look at notifications that somebody receives in a day, at least 65 to around 150 every single day. How many times the average person pick up their phone every single day, between 96 to 144 times a day. Social media check-ins, on average, 27 times per day. Time spent on screens, whether that's your phone, your computer, your TV, on average, 7 to 10 hours a day for most adults. Email sent and received, around 121 per day. Text messages, around 40 per day. So that's hundreds of micro hits of input before you even factor in the environmental noise and the sounds that are happening in the background that your brain's constantly paying attention to and filtering.

8:17The background chatter, the traffic sounds, the kids that you have, pets that you have to pay attention to, your notifications, reminders, alerts, pop-ups, clickbait. On average, the average adult gets around 6 ,000 to 10 ,000 ads per day alone. And we will be right back. Hey, showing up for yourself day in and day out and doing the hard things is what creates a better life. And noon hydration helps you stay moving with the real deal. Activated hydration built to support you through those moments that challenge you. Noon hydration tablets deliver clean ingredients and optimize electrolytes that hydrate better than water alone, especially when you're sweating or on the go.

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10:25That's S-Q-U-A-R-E dot com slash G-O slash mindset mentor. Get started with Square and build a setup that works the way you do. Have you ever been late night shopping, finally found exactly what you've been looking for, added it to your cart and then realized your card's nowhere in sight. And just when you're about to give up, you see that purple pay button, one tap, and you're checked out in seconds. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10 % of all e-commerce in the US, from household names to brands just getting started. Tackle all those important tasks in one place, from inventory to payments to analytics and more.

11:04Their shop pay button is used by millions of businesses, and it's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. It also helps boost conversions, meaning less carts going abandoned and more sales for you. See less carts go abandoned and more sales with Shopify and their ShopPay button. Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash dial. Go to shopify.com slash dial. That's shopify.com slash dial. And now back to the show. So your brain is just constantly dealing with all this stuff. So I want you just to take a step back and take a deep breath and realize like there is a lot that your brain is trying to process.

11:43And so what I like to do is I like to look at what everybody else in the world is doing most of the time and I like to do the exact opposite. And so when I look at people, most people are on their phones and they're distracted all the time and they're constantly, constantly, constantly being distracted with more and more stimuli. So what I've been doing over the past couple of years is removing myself from all of that as much as I possibly can. Deleting a lot of stuff, getting rid of notifications, getting rid of social media if I'm not getting any sort of benefit from it, or at least on following people who I'm not getting benefit from, and only following people that are good for my mindset and good for my brain.

12:20And so what does all of this do? Well, it becomes cognitive overload if we don't. So your prefrontal cortex, which is, you know, the part of your brain which is responsible for decision making and for your focus and impulse control actually just gets exhausted through all of this. And so sensory overload does that to your prefrontal cortex. It also causes amygdala activation. Amygdala is where fear and anxiety comes from. It's that part of your brain. So it increases your anxiety, increases your irritability, it increases your emotional reactivity. Neuroimaging studies actually show that constant digital stimulation reduces the gray matter in your brain, which is areas responsible for self-regulation and how to regulate the way that you feel and empathy for other people.

13:08And the average worker switches tasks over 300 times a day. And so when you look at it, it's kind of like modern life is a full-on attention war zone. And so you need to take a step back from a lot of these things because your brain wasn't designed for all of this stimuli. It's meant for meaningful natural stimuli, not processing a thousand microsignals and dopamine loops and cortisol and task switches every single day. So if you feel fried or foggy or any of that, you're not broken. You're just over-processed. And so really that's what I want to talk about today. And I wanted to spend nine minutes telling you this to actually, hopefully, like, if you remember in Billy Madison where he takes a little, the little kid that's like, I can't wait to get to high school.

13:50And he takes his little chunky cheeks and he shakes his face and he's like, you know, because they're older, remember this, he shakes his face. He's like, don't say that. Don't ever say that. Like, that's what I hope for. Hopefully this past nine minutes is like shaking you to be like, like get rid of all of the shit that's constantly distracting yourself all the time because it's making you emotionally numb and giving you decision fatigue and making you irritable and it's reducing your productivity and it's screwing with your sleep and your rest and it's making you dull and just overstimulated all of the time.

14:23It's making you into just more of a zombie than you need to be. And then it screws with your nervous system. So I'm not trying to scare the shit out of you. I promise I'm going to give you some tips today, but I am trying to get you to wake up to understand we need to take a step back from all this stuff. Because when you have so much overstimulation, your nervous system ends up having a lot of cortisol that runs through it, which is your body's primary stress hormone. So when your brain's constantly taking in stimuli, what's called your sympathetic nervous system, which is fight or flight. And there's your sympathetic, there's your nervous system, which is your sympathetic nervous system and then your parasympathetic nervous system.

14:59Parasympathetic is the calm, cool, collected, rest, relaxation. That's parasympathetic. Sympathetic is fight or flight. And so when you're constantly getting all of this stuff hitting you all the time, it's clicking on your sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight or flight, and it stays on. And there was a study that was done in 2013 that was published in the Psychoneuroendocrinology that showed that chronic exposure to even low-level stressors, like constant alerts, noise, notifications, all of that, can keep cortisol levels elevated throughout the entire day. And so what does that mess with?

15:32Your immune system, your gut health, your memory, your mood, your focus, your hormone balance, all of that stuff. And so overstimulation affects your mind, but it also affects your ability to connect. It affects not being able to fully connect with the people around you, your children, your wife, not wanting to go out and hang out with people as much because there's too much happening. So if you ever find yourself avoiding phone calls or zoning out in conversations or needing a week to recover from a social event, it might not be that you're an introvert. It might just be that that's your brain trying to protect you from more input they can actually handle.

16:05And so in kids, we actually call this sensory overload. Like I've seen it in my son because he's just so new to this world that if there's too much going on. I can see him actually start to kind of get frazzled and stressed. Sometimes like when the dogs are playing in front of him and there's, you know, music going on in the background, he's like, he'll start to like get a little bit stressed. You can see sensory overload. In adults, we just call it, oh, I'm just, I'm just tired. I just need a little space. But we downplay it more than we should. It's the same neurological shutdown. And so it's really interesting about the whole thing is that overstimulation, when you look at it, it actually mimics the symptoms of depression, anxiety, and ADHD.

16:45So there's so many people that are just self-diagnosing, oh, I have depression, oh, I have anxiety, oh, I have ADHD. But in reality, it could just be there's way more overstimulation you realize. And the overstimulation actually mimics the feelings and the looks of depression, anxiety, and ADHD. And so you might be just a little bit overstimulated, right? So that's really what I'm trying to get to you to understand here. So what do we want to do in this case? We want to be able to de-stimulate. Sounds pretty good. Without having to like move into the middle of the woods and never see anybody or like move to a monastery and become a monk or something like that.

17:23So what do you actually do around this? Here's your nervous system's version of a bubble bath, right? That's basically what this is. The first thing is to start a daily low stimulation ritual. The first thing I'll say more than anything else, and this is something I've said hundreds of times on this podcast, but I haven't said it recently, is when your alarm goes off, turn it off and then give yourself a certain time that you do not look at your phone. I've noticed of myself that because my phone, my alarm is on my phone. So if I roll over and I end up turning it off and I look at my phone, even just to, you know, I'm going to turn off airplane mode and I turn it off airplane mode and boom, I get hit with a text message and immediately start thinking about that thing that happened.

18:09And so I'll give you a really odd example. Okay. The other day I got a text message from somebody and it was somebody just sending something to me that they thought was, it was a friend of mine that sent something to me they thought was inspiring. And it was Will Smith talking, right, about something. And so I didn't even watch the video. I just saw that, oh, they sent me this inspiring Will Smith video. So I turned my phone. It was a quick like hit. I just saw it real quick. And I was like, all right, cool. I'll get back to it. About 20 minutes later, I'm in my meditation and I can't stop thinking about Will Smith.

18:44And I'm like, what the hell is going on with me? This doesn't make any sense. And I was like, oh, that's right. I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about the pursuit of happiness. I'm thinking about the, when he played an I Am Legend or whatever that whole, that movie is. I think about all the thing about the fact that he, you know, oh my gosh, I wonder what it's like for him now that, you know, a couple of years ago since he smacked Chris Rock. And so there was no other real sensory input that came into my brain, but my brain latched onto this thing. I'm in the middle of a meditation. I'm thinking about all of this stuff around Will Smith because I happen to just bing, see a text message come in about some inspiring thing that came in from Will Smith.

19:16And so what I recommend is that when your alarm goes off, give yourself a certain time, whether it's 30 minutes, an hour, even a couple hours, hopefully, where you don't look at your phone because you can't underestimate how much a quick little thinking of something and seeing something can get stuck in your brain for the rest of the day. And so what I recommend is you have a low stimulation ritual, at least one moment in your day that is tech-free, that is task-free, and that is quiet. It could be a meditation if you want to, or you could be sitting outside watching the sky in the middle of the day.

19:53You have your lunch and you go outside for 10 minutes and you just look at the sky and you just listen to birds chirp. Or in the morning, you can sip your coffee without your phone and you can close your eyes and breathe deeply for 60 seconds. You know, studies show that even 10 minutes of silence reduces stress and improves your cognitive function. Try it out. So low stimulation ritual that you do every single day. The next thing I recommend is this. Try batching your notifications. Okay. The beautiful thing about most phones now is if you have the newest version of them, you could turn them on do not disturb.

20:27And what's good about do not disturb is no notifications really come in unless it's an emergency. You can set it up that way. So you have notification hours. So let's say from like, you know, while you're at work, you have your emails and you have all this stuff from 9am to 12 can be like your notification hours. And then you turn them off from 12 until 4.30 so that you can get some deep work done while you're at work and you're not distracted by all the things that are happening. And then from 4.30 to 5, you could turn it back on and see what you missed in four and a half hours. I promise you, it's probably not that urgent of stuff.

21:00And so you use your do not disturb. You have your notification hours. You batch your notifications. You move distracting apps off your home screen. Don't use your phone for the first hour of the day, the last hour of your day. You know, your brain needs kind of the bookends of calm. Give it some space to digest. Another thing that I recommend is to go on a stimulation fast. Try 24 hours with no screens, with no music, with no social media. This is something my wife and I just decided to do this past week where I'm like, man, it's kind of like they used to have a really good idea when you look at whether it was Saturday for some religions or Sunday for other religions where it was like, hey, you don't work.

21:42You don't do anything else. You just spend time with family. So I'm like, we should have one day where we just have no screens that ever go on. And the other day I was like, I recommended it and it was like five o 'clock. I was like, let's just not look at any screens until we go to bed tonight. So we just hung out and we just talked and we hung out with the baby and it was great. So I was like, let's do it for 24 hours. And so I recommend having like a stimulation fast. Try it just for 24 hours one time. And then what I recommend is trying to actually have a day where you do that. And, you know, if you're single and you live by yourself, well, then it's just your thoughts.

22:14A notebook, maybe a walk. You know, you might feel bored. That's a good thing. Once again, as I've said many times this podcast, stop saying that you're bored and start saying that you're resting your brain. You're just resting. It's like a spa, Like a spa day for your brain is what it is in your nervous system. Boredom is a gateway to creativity, to emotional clarity, to getting more focused. It's a good thing. Another thing I'll say is prioritize deep focus over shallow input as well. Deep focus. So you can do deep work of two hours of just working on one thing and one thing only. Or you can decide that you're going to read a physical book and you're going to just work on that for the next 30 minutes.

22:55You can decide, you know, instead of me typing something out, what I'm going to start doing is I'm going to start writing things out. Maybe what you do is writing so you're physically and mentally connected to that piece of paper. You say, I'm going to do one task at a time. I know it's radical. Radical to think you could do one task at a time, right? One task at a time and I'm going to dedicate the next 30 minutes to doing this thing. So it's like prioritizing deep focus and just doing one thing versus shallow input and having to feel like you have to do a million things. because I know I've done it before.

23:26I'm in the middle of reading and I literally think I need to check my phone. I'm like, oh, I got this idea. I got to do this thing. It's like, nope, I'm going to do this thing and this thing only. I'm going to get my mind better at focusing because deep focus strengthens your prefrontal cortex, which is your decision-making part of your brain. And it improves your willpower and decision-making when you do this. And so try to get some deep focus time. And then last thing that I recommend is go out in nature more often. like trade artificial stimulation for natural rhythms. Sunlight instead of screens and artificial light.

24:04Walking out in nature instead of scrolling. Silence instead of Spotify. Nature recalibrates your senses. There's many studies that have been done on this. And I think it's Japan, they call it going, it's called forest bathing, where you actually go out into the forest and just be there because it actually starts to regulate your nervous system, regulate your brain, it calms you down. There's a reason why forced bathing reduce your cortisol and boost your moods. And it's because we are from all of that. Stop thinking you're different than nature. You're from nature. And so the thing I really just want you to understand, and hopefully I didn't scare the shit out of you as I was going through this episode, I just wanted to give you the real hard facts is you might not be lazy.

24:43You might not be unmotivated. You might just be, you might not be tired. You might just be overstimulated. And so if you've been beating yourself up for being unfocused or tired or unmotivated or emotionally flat. What if it's not just you? What if it's all of the noise? You don't need to do more. You need to do less for a little while. Let your brain and your nervous system relax. Let your soul catch up to it. Take a couple deep breaths, you know, start to feel a little bit more grounded, feel a little bit more creative, start to feel a little bit more like you. And so that's what I recommend.