What’s Your Mental Diet

0:07Welcome 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 podcast episode. I put out episodes four times a week to try to help you grow and improve yourself, to understand your mindset, to understand your psychology, to understand how your brain works so that you can grow and improve yourself four times a week. So if you would want to go ahead and listen to us four times a week, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. Today, I'm going to be talking to you about your diet.

0:35I'm not going to be talking to you about the diet, the food that goes into your body. I'm going to talk about everything else that you consume. I'm going to talk about your mental diet. And I thought about this episode. I was already thinking about this episode. And then my chiropractor came and was working on me this week. And we started talking about a mental diet and what we consume. And I want you to just think about this for a second. Let's go back to food, right? Imagine that you eat shitty food all day long. Like you eat just the worst food that you possibly can. lots of grease, lots of sugar, all of that, and you start from the morning, you eat it, afternoon, eat it, dinner, eat it.

1:17How is that going to make you feel? Do you think that there is a possibility that if you wake up and you have a shitty breakfast and you have a greasy, gross breakfast that's really high in carbs and really high in sugar, is it going to affect you and your energy throughout the day? Is it going to carry with you the rest of the day? Is there any way that you could eat that shitty food and it would have no effect on you at all? No, absolutely not. You know, hopefully, that when you eat something, it's going to affect you in a positive or negative way, right? Now, I want you to understand that there's not really much of a difference between the food that you consume and everything else that you consume.

2:04I get a lot of people that come to me and they send me messages on Instagram and I read a lot of Instagram messages and I try to help people as much as I can. And if there's an episode that's helped them that they've asked me about, and I'm like, hey, you could go to listen to this. This might actually help you. But so many people want to improve their lives, but they won't work on themselves, or they put in the work on themselves, excuse me, but they never actually check their environment. They never check everything else. So they're like, oh, I'm trying to grow myself. I'm reading books. I'm going to conferences.

2:34And then I started talking to them a little bit more. And I realized like everything else besides them in their environment is all over the place. And it makes it, it's not impossible to become the person that you want to become or, um, you know, impossible to, to fix your mindset when you're in an environment that's terrible. It's not impossible, but it is much harder. That's for sure. You are a product of your environment. You think how other people think around you and whatever else you end up consuming. And there's a lot of stuff that you might be consuming in this moment that aren't really helping you in many ways.

3:12And in fact, might actually be holding you back from becoming the person that you want to become. You know, the good thing is, is you're listening to this podcast. So hopefully you're listening to this podcast and other podcasts and trying to put information into your brain that will help you become who you want to become. I personally try not to allow myself to be influenced by anything outside of what I want to be influenced by. Like for instance, when I wake up in the morning, the very first thing that I do after I brush my teeth, after I go to the bathroom, after I drink water is I always do my breath work and my meditation.

3:43And I have noticed, you know, I'll go into YouTube and I listen to breath work and meditations on YouTube and that's how I do it every single morning. You know, sometimes you go to the homepage of YouTube and they have something really interesting. like you know I'm like oh man like Lauren's not here yet she just went to the bathroom let me go ahead and and look at this brand new Lamborghini that just came out or whatever it might be and I click on the Lamborghini and it's a 45 second short video that's on YouTube and then I'm in the middle of my meditation and 15 minutes later I think of a Lamborghini or I think of the car that just popped up or I think of whatever it is that I just watched and I think to myself whatever I wake up in the morning and I look at something or I talk to someone or I see something on Instagram, whatever it is that it might be, I am allowing that thing to own a piece of my brain for the rest of the day because it pops back up.

4:36It's just like, you know, it's part of your reticular activating system at that point in time. Like if I say, hey, you know, let me know how many red cars you see on your drive to work today, you're going to notice all the red cars. But if I don't say it, you're not going to notice those red cars. And so it's part of your reticular activate system. Your brain will look for anything that it's been conditioned to look for throughout the day. And so there's no way that I could watch terrible TV and trash TV and follow people on Instagram and see that in the morning and not be influenced by it the rest of the day.

5:11I see it as stealing a piece of property in my brain for the day. And then you start to think about it, you're like, do I want that person that I follow on Instagram to own a piece of property in my brain today? And so the way I like to think about it is I don't allow myself at this point anymore to be influenced anymore before meditation. And so I try to keep my phone off for a couple hours after I wake up. I don't want to think about work. I don't want to get text messages. I don't want to look at emails. I don't want to look at Instagram, none of those things. And so I want you to start to think about, I'm going to go through with you some of the things that you might be consuming that you might not even know are really affecting you.

5:51So the first thing, obviously, is the news. I have a friend whose grandma is so fearful and I've known her for a while. And every time I see her, she thinks the world is crumbling, like absolutely going to shit. She's so fearful. And I ended up finding out, I was like, man, your grandma is so fearful. Why is she always so afraid? And talking about, oh, this is so scary that's happening in the world. And oh, that's so scary. He's like, every time I go to her house, she has the news on. And she has the news on all day long. And we tell her, stop watching the news. And she won't stop watching the news.

6:28And she has become afraid to leave the house because the news makes this poor lady think that the world is completely terrible and she needs to be afraid all of the time. So she's afraid to leave the house. She's in her late 80s, almost 90s. So when she was younger, the news was trustworthy. Now it's not really trustworthy. What you decide to follow and the news that you decide to bring into your brain is saying, hey, I want this to own a piece of real estate in my brain. If that's what you want, completely fine. I understand if that's what you want. But if it's not what you want, maybe you should start to reassess.

7:05It's completely cool. And once again, there is no right or wrong. It's completely up to you and what it is that you want. I know it is that I want. Now you just need to figure out like, how do I want to be influenced? How do I want to be thinking throughout the day? Do I feel myself very fearful when I leave the house? Am I listening to something that's making me fearful? And am I following people that are making me fearful? Just something to think about. Another thing that you want to start thinking about is other people that are around you. People that you surround yourself with. Just think about the people that you surround yourself with.

7:36You know, there's the phrase, and I'm sure you've heard it before. I've heard it a hundred thousand times, which is you are the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. You literally become the people that you spend the most time with. So I want you to look at the people that you spend the most time with and, you know, outside of your family and your children and your wife and husband or whatever it might be in your friends and look at your friends and say, you know, are these people helping me grow and helping me get to who I want to be? Or are they holding me back in some sort of way?

8:05and just start thinking about and you don't have to just cut people out of your life or say, oh no, I don't want to be around that person. But just start thinking about who you spend time with and the other people that are around you, right? Think about the people that you surround yourself with. Are they helping you become the best version of yourself? Are they hurting you? You know, when you have a success, do these people celebrate you or are they trying to poke holes in all of your success? You know, I hear sometimes where people, people say that the people that they're closest to their boyfriend, their girlfriend, sometimes they'll, they'll want to celebrate something with them.

8:34And they, that person just talks shit about their, the, the thing that the, the wind that they just had in their life. That's crazy. I don't know about you guys. Like I want the people I surround myself with. I want to be able to build them up. And I also want to be built up. I want to feel better. I want people to celebrate with me. And, um, you know, if you're having people around you, don't sell that, don't celebrate your successes or bring it down. Maybe you should just reevaluate that relationship and, uh, you know, see if it's really helping you. Uh, next thing you want to think about as well, that's super, super important is your social media, right?

9:04Like for me, who you're following is super, super important. Like for me, I'll just be honest with you guys, I'm spending less and less and less time on social media. I am only getting onto it because of the fact that I have business that I run on it. And I also put, you know, content out there because I want to impact the world. I know most people are going to social media. And so instead of avoiding it, I'm trying to put out content to hopefully help other people that are out there. If I didn't have any business that was running on social media and I wasn't putting out content to help people, I would definitely 100 % not be on social media at all.

9:37I would have no accounts. And so the reason why is because I just don't see the value in it anymore, if I'm being honest with you. But if you're going to be on social media, have you taken an assessment of who you're following on social media? Because when you follow someone, you are allowing them to once again own and occupy a part of your brain. So, you know, I said this a couple of years ago, probably I noticed that I was, I was feeling kind of like shit one day and I wasn't feeling really good. And I was like, man, I feel like kind of anxious. I don't feel good. I feel kind of sad. Like, I don't know what's going on.

10:08And I thought about, I was like, oh my gosh, there's people whose stories I was looking at when, you know, the world was kind of crazy and they were just, it was doom and gloom. And then it was this side against that side. And I was like, I got to start unfollowing people. And that day I unfollowed like 600 people because I was like, I'm just not going to follow these people anymore because I've noticed that just seeing a 15 second story from this person makes me feel worse. And I had no idea before that. And so you have to realize that when you're following someone on social media, you are in a way saying, I want to allow this person to help me or hurt me in the way that I think I'm going to take part of what they say and how they act and I'm going to put it into my brain.

10:50And so you've got to take it real serious, what it is that you're putting into your brain and what you're consuming. When you think of reality TV, right? Like what TV are you watching? Are you watching reality TV? Like that's one of the trashiest mental diets that you could be on. And I've had this conversation with my wife before too, where she's like, oh, it's not really that big of a deal. And I was like, it is kind of a big deal because you're watching people treat each other this way. Like you can't think that that doesn't influence you in some sort of way throughout the day. You can't think that doesn't influence you.

11:23There's no way to think that watching trashy TV doesn't influence your brain in any sort of way. Right? And so it doesn't, it's like eating, you can't just eat fast food and it doesn't, and it goes in and nothing happens. It's the exact same thing. You can't just watch things. You can't just talk to people. You can't see people yell at each other or drama and all that stuff. and not think that that doesn't affect you in some sort of way throughout the day and especially affect you in the way you feel, you know? And so you got to start to think about that. Like, what is it about? Is this thing that I'm consuming because I am deciding to put it into my body?

11:59I'm not physically putting it into my body like I do when I eat, but I'm deciding I'm actually consuming and putting this thing into my mind. Is this TV show? Is this news? Is this stuff that I'm watching helping or hurting me in any sort of way? you have to understand that there is not a huge difference in the way that you can, the food that you consume and the diet that you're on physically and the food that you put in your mouth and the mental food that you consume with who you surround yourself with, who you follow on social media, how you act, the reality TV, the news, all of that stuff. It's going to affect you in some sort of way.

12:39So for me, like I'm very, here's another big thing. The music that you listen to, right? I love some music that is trash music sometimes. And I'll listen to it sometimes. I'm not completely off it. Sometimes you got to give yourself a little snack if you want to, you know, when you've been really good with your diet. And so it's okay. It's not a huge thing, but also just be a little bit more aware when you're listening to music and the stuff that you're repeating out loud, the words that you're, the lyrics that you're repeating out loud, because lyrics in a song, essentially that you're saying out loud are like affirmations.

13:15So when you say those things out loud, is that how you want to think about yourself? Is that how you want to think about other people? Is that how you want to think about the world? If it is awesome, but if it's not, maybe there is something that affects the way that you, you know, you think and feel like for me, like I have made a big change recently and started They're listening to a lot of, there's music where they'll take great philosophers and, you know, spiritual teachers and all of that stuff, and they'll put it over slow EDM type music. And so it's music and you're listening to it. It's got a little bit of a beat to it, but you're also listening to a great philosopher or somebody who, in my mind, has a pretty good grip on life and the way that it is.

13:58And I'm allowing that to come into my brain. And so the same way that you are what you eat, you are what you consume. And you're always consuming something. The only time you're not consuming something is if you're sitting down and it's completely silent. That's way more important than consuming anything, in my opinion. But when you sit down and you decide to read something or to scroll through Instagram or to watch something on the news or to go to a website or to put on a song, you are allowing a part of your brain to be occupied by that thing that you are doing. It doesn't just go in and go out.

14:34I promise you that. And so if you want to change who you are and the way that you act and who you surround yourself with, start to go through and just make an assessment. And once again, you don't have to get completely rid of everything if you don't want to, but I would start to scale back on the things that you feel are not helping you. If it doesn't serve you, maybe you should spend a little bit less time with it. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on Instagram stories and tag me at Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And that's the only way that we really grow and improve and impact more people's lives.

15:09So, you know, if you've ever gotten any value from this podcast, I would greatly appreciate if you would go ahead and share it so that more people could find it who have never listened to it before. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.