Your Best Defense Against Brain Rot

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1:28Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another podcast episode. We put out four times a week to help you learn and grow and improve yourself for the past 10 years now. So if you want to learn and grow and improve yourself so you can improve your life, hit that subscribe button. Today, I'm going to talk to you about why self-education is your best bet as a defense against brain rot. Because what if I told you your brain is either growing or decaying? There is no neutral. It's either green and growing or brown and dying.

2:04And if you're not actively learning and challenging yourself, chances are you might be passively rotting. Every scroll, every shortcut, every TikTok video, every mindless dopamine hit is training your brain to actually get weaker. And the thing about it that's really hard is that you won't really notice it at first until one day you can't focus. You can't think very clear. You don't remember things like you used to. Well, self-education is your only defense against a life that you sleepwalk through and realizing that nobody is going to come save your mind and grow your brain except for you. So let's discuss this mental decay that no one really talks about at all because brain rot is real and it's probably already affecting more people than we actually realize.

2:56So if you've ever felt like, man, like, why can't I focus like I used to? Or you're forgetting your words mid-sentence or you walk into a room and you're like, why did I just walk in here? Or you scroll for an hour and then you don't even recall anything that you saw. or if you feel more bored or disconnected or numb and you can't really explain why, these might be the reasons why. It's not just the way modern life is. And it's not just getting older like some people think. That is an actual malnourished brain. It is mental atrophy. And there was a study that was done at the University of Texas that found that the disuse of the brain literally shrinks your brain matter.

3:37And so in this study, participants who didn't engage in challenging mental activities compared to those who did should reduce gray matter in their brain. Gray matter is the stuff that's responsible for memory, for decision-making, and focus. There was another study that was done at Harvard Medical School that found the hippocampus, which is your brain's memory center, shrinks if it is underused. So if you look at neuroplasticity, which is your brain's ability to change itself, like neuroplasticity 101 is that neurons that fire together, wire together. And when they wire together, they get stronger.

4:12But if neurons don't fire, they literally start to wither away. And so you've got to start to view your brain like a muscle. Just like in your body, if you stop using your biceps, your biceps are going to get weaker with time. And so if your brain's starting to feel more sluggish or more soft, then listen, I'm not judging you in any sort of way. We've all been there. I've been there before. Life gets busy and suddenly you're watching another episode of a show that you don't even like and you're eating snacks that you didn't even really mean to grab. And you're scrolling through, you know, 16 versions of the exact same meme and your soul is like, hey, what the hell are we even doing here?

4:56Like, what is what is this life all about? That is brain rot. And I've been there before in the past and I never want to get back there again. But the beautiful part about all of this is that this is completely reversible. Just like I said, if you stop using your bicep, it will get weaker. Well, if you decide, hey, I want my biceps to be stronger and you want to grow them just like any muscle, your memory and your focus can get better at any age. And this is where self-education really steps in. It's basically the medicine for that beautiful machine that you have in your noggin. And so self-education, you deciding to educate yourself is your best mental defense.

5:38I'm going to be super upfront with you, okay? No matter what you're doing every single day, you are being educated every single day. But the only question is, are you choosing the curriculum for your education or is TikTok or Instagram or the news or the algorithm or all of those things deciding your curriculum or are you? because every scroll that you have, every video that you go through, every soundbite, all of those things are shaping your neural pathways about what you think about, about what you feel, about how you view other people, about how you view the world. And so this really comes down to you have two choices.

6:16Either you can use passive consumption, which is you just scrolling through things and being passively brainwashed by everybody else, or active learning, which is you going, I'm going to brainwash myself. I'm going to learn what I want to learn. I'm going to focus. I'm going to try to grow my brain so that I can become better. When you look at active learning, a 2014 Stanford study showed that active learning significantly increases your comprehension, your memory, and your long-term retention of the information that you're consuming. So in other words, if you're just taking in random content without any sort of intention, it's not going to stick.

6:58Your brain doesn't grow. It's like fast food for your brain. But when you self-educate intentionally, when you say, I want to learn and grow and get better and understand more about this topic, and you do it every day, even if it's just for 10 to 30 minutes a day, and you try to grow yourself, the effect on your brain and your life is exponential. and so you start getting a better attention span. Your curiosity starts to heighten. Your sense of power becomes better and honestly, your sense of self becomes better because the thing that nobody will really tell you is a lot of the confidence that you're probably missing and you wish that you had, it actually just comes from lack of reps.

7:44And so the more that you could put in reps and learn and grow and improve yourself, more confidence will come from that. if you're just passively absorbing junk all day, you're not going to feel smart. You're not going to feel creative. You're not going to feel confident in yourself because you're just learning a bunch of random things that have nothing to do with the life you're trying to build. But when you study and say, okay, here's where I want my life to be in five years. And in order for me to get myself there in five years, I need to download knowledge into my brain. I need to download skill sets into my brain.

8:15I need to study. I need to stretch myself. I need to challenge my mind, when you start doing that and it lines up with where you're trying to go in your life and you start stacking small wins, they build a better brain and long-term will build a better life. And this is incredibly important. If your family has a history of neurodegenerative diseases, there was a study that was done at the Journal of American Medical Association, which is JAMA, in 2002, where researchers found that adults who engage in frequent cognitive activities like reading, writing, or learning had a 46 % lower risk of developing dementia compared to those who didn't.

8:57And so what does that mean? Your brain stays stronger, longer when you use it regularly. Learning literally protects against cognitive decline. Another study in 2020 that was done by Harvard Health Publishing found that staying mentally active through activities like studying and reading and journaling or playing an instrument or learning new skills, when you learn like that and grow yourself, you can actually slow age-related cognitive decline and can actually delay the onset of Alzheimer's. So what does that mean? It means challenging your brain with new learning helps your brain build resilience over time.

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12:30Whether your company earns millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you stay ahead of the pack. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get our free business guide, Demystifying AI, at netsuite.com slash D-I-A-L. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash D-I-A-L. netsuite.com slash D-I-A-L. And now back to the show. No, of course not. You would expect it, but most people never question what they're feeding their mind. If you're just binging surface level 15 second videos for an hour or watching the same drama BS reality TV shows or consuming just content and passively without intention, that's the mental equivalent of eating junk food.

13:22And then we wonder like, oh, why can't I focus? Why do I feel like I have so much anxiety? Why am I so anxious? Why don't I feel motivated or inspired in my life? That's why. Because you're feeding your brain a bunch of trash. And so you have to understand you're not broken. You're not unfixable, your brain is literally malnourished. It needs you to step in and help it. And the longer that you go unchecked, the more that your brain adapts to this low level quality of stimulation. Like you're literally training yourself, you're training your brain to tolerate a lower quality brain. And if we're being completely honest, a lower quality life for that matter than what is actually possible for you.

14:09And so this is why self-education is so important. Self-education disrupts this cycle. It rewires your brain towards higher function, towards deeper thinking, and towards better decision-making and better focus. And so let me pivot just to something more empowering because I'm not trying to scare the shit out of you. I'm just trying to really make you understand the importance of what you consume inside of your mind. The magic of being a human and being alive right now is that you can teach yourself anything, like anything. That's what's so amazing about being alive today. If you were alive a hundred years ago, there was a very limited amount of things that you could learn today, whatever you want.

14:47It's a buffet, but just pick one thing. If you want to learn like sales psychology, it's online. If you want to learn how to design websites, there's courses everywhere. Want to study investing or parenting or therapy or trauma or neuroscience, all of those things are one click away. You can consume any content you want. You can learn anything that you want. And so if you feel like you're stuck, you're not stuck because you're not smart. You're probably stuck because you stop challenging yourself to learn. And mind you, when I say learn, I'm not even talking about the education system. The education system didn't teach you how to self-educate.

15:32It taught you how to perform. It taught you how to pass tests. That's not education. Real education, like the kind that challenges you and challenge your brain, is self-led education. Where do I want to be in life? What do I need to learn to get there? What knowledge do I need to download into my brain? what skill sets do I need to become better at in the actual physical world? That's self-education. You know, there's a quote by Jim Rohn that I love around this. It says, formal education will make you a living, but self-education will make you a fortune. And so it doesn't mean that you need to study for three hours a day.

16:07You can if you want, if you've got the time to do it. But what it could look like is deciding what you need to learn, what you need to download into that beautiful brain of yours, and reading 10 pages of a book before you go to bed or taking a 10 minute YouTube tutorial on something useful and taking notes and actually using that YouTube tutorial and actually really trying it in real life. It could be taking notes on a podcast like this instead of just passively listening to it. Because when you passively listen, you don't recall as much. So you sit down, you decide to take some notes and then go, okay, where can I use this in my life today?

16:40It could be finding journal prompts that challenge your way of thinking that make you think outside of the box that you typically think in. Because there's a real cost for staying passive and just like not being in charge of your own education. The real cost of ignoring this is the price of not actually like understanding who you could be. It's not just like, it's not just missed opportunities. It's missed versions of you, like who you could become, the you that you could be in the future. if you could download these things, the you that's more confident, the one that's more clear or courageous, or the one that can do anything that you set your mind to.

17:23And you miss out on that version of you because you today never gave that version of you the tools to become that version of you. There was a study that was done in 2020 at the University of Michigan that showed that adults who engage in lifetime learning were 40 % less likely to experience depression, loneliness, and cognitive decline. So let me repeat that and put it into layman's terms, right? Lifelong learners were 40 % more mentally resilient. They were happier. They were less lonely. They were less anxious. And so if you're out here feeling like, I don't know what I'm doing with myself. And you feel like you're stuck, or you feel like you're uninspired or you feel like you're unmotivated.

18:07It might not be about your goals. It might be that your mind is just starving for new challenges and new ways of thinking and new ideas. And so like I've always thought about it. One of my mentors used to always say, and I think I said it earlier, is you're either green and growing or brown and dying. And I never wanted my mind in my life to be brown and dying. Like when I think of like brown and dying and being stagnant, Like the thing that I think about when I think of like being stagnant in life is like a stagnant pond and like that visual of like the pond that has like it's brown and it's got the film over top of it and a bunch of flies and you know, there's a dead frog in it.

18:47I'm like, that's not, that's not like the metaphor that I want for my life. And so if I'm not green and growing, I'm brown and dying. So how can I make sure that every single day I'm green and growing? How can I make sure that every single day I'm challenging myself? And so let's land this plane with something like super simple and super practical, right? Your anti-brain rot protocol and keep it really simple. For 15 to 20 minutes a day, that's it. I want you to choose one topic that excites you or scares you or something that you really want to understand or that lines up with a future version of you.

19:22And you're gonna pick one medium, which could be like a book, a video, an article, a podcast, an online course. So one topic, one medium that you're gonna learn, and you're going to put it on for 15 to 20 minutes and you're going to take notes. Even if it's just like three to five really key bullet points that hit you the hardest. And then after you write those down, you finish these 20 minutes of learning, you have your five bullet points. Just sit for a second and like ask yourself one question, like reflect on it. How can this apply to my life right now? How can I use this in my life right now?

19:57And then if you really want to make sure that you click it into your brain, one of the best ways, not one of the best ways, the best way to learn something is to teach it to somebody. It's the best way to learn is to just go and explain it. And so go and teach what you just learned to somebody else. And if nobody else is around to talk to, talk out loud to yourself and teach it to yourself. In life, if you want to create the life that you want, you don't need to become a genius. You just need to challenge yourself again. Because the best version of you, the sharp, focused, smart, courageous, like creative version of you, they're not gone.

20:31They're just buried under all of this social media and noise and distraction and ads and unintentional content and all that stuff. What you really need to do is wake them up. Your best defense against a mediocre life is a mind that is alive, a mind that's engaged, a mind that is always growing. And that's what self-education gives you. So my recommendation, start today. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you are wanting to make 2026 the best year of your life, but you struggle with setting goals and planning them out, I have a 30-minute video that you can download for free. All you have to do is press play, get your journal, and get your pen.

21:11And by the end of that video, you will have all of your goals for 2026 figured out and a plan that you can take action on. So if you want to download that absolutely free, go to GoalMastery2026.com. Once again, GoalMastery2026.com. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day. Hey, Fidelity. What's it cost to invest with the Fidelity app? Start with as little as$1 with no account fees or trade commissions on US stocks and ETFs. Hmm, that's music to my ears.

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