How to Become More Mentally Efficient & Conscientious

and so today i wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about conscientiousness and so um i know this is kind of weird but like i got this question a year ago like literally like a year ago or maybe even over a year ago and um i i know this sounds bizarre but i actually did not have an answer so people kept on asking me like how do i improve my conscientiousness so i've been working on it for like a year and trying to figure out like reading papers on on personality assessment you know like reading some of these old texts on yoga um and things like that so in trying to figure out like okay how can we improve conscientiousness is there a way to do it so came up with a couple of theories and then tried to test them out with a couple of people over the last few years what does it mean i know we'll we'll um uh we'll get into i'll explain what all that is and so then tested it with a few people and it turns out that it actually does kind of work at least anecdotally so that's what i want to kind of talk to you guys about today so this is going to be we're going to use um you know like i'm going to draw a little bit so let's kind of dive in okay so the first thing to understand is that um so when we look at different kinds of different people we have different personalities or different kind of cognitive traits or styles and in the east we look at systems like ayurveda or traditional chinese medicine which will use elements to describe what kind of person someone is um so they'll say that like for example a vata person is like a wind type and so their mind is like the wind so it it blows hard in one direction and then like changes direction easily so vatas are people who get bored who's easily pick things up very quickly they can be very passionate about things for like 15 minutes and then it kind of like you know isn't stable isn't consistent so that's where the eastern system in the western system there's one really good uh validated model of personality and that is the five factor model and so the five factor model basically studied people's personalities and what they found using a technique called factor analysis is that personality tends to cluster in five different groups okay so these groups are extraversion openness agreeableness conscientiousness and neuroticism and so what do these five factors mean so extroversion is like how extroverted or introverted you are um so people who have high extraversion like tend to get relaxed with other people they draw energy from other people people who have low extroversion prefer to be like by themselves um it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how many friends you make or how charismatic you are it's just sort of you know what you prefer so openness is like is a tendency to like openness new experiences so you tend to be like open-minded as opposed to like a little bit more traditional agreeableness is like how likely you are to get along with other people and like kind of be malleable or flexible with your thinking it doesn't mean that you're nice or mean it just means that like you kind of you know are pretty like open mind uh you're willing to sort of change your views to accommodate others um and then we get to conscientiousness so this is kind of a big thing in the gaming community because people who like so this is a cool thing about the gaming community is that a lot of people nowadays who like read the internet are actually like amateur psychologists which i think is fantastic so you guys you know do a lot of research you guys read a lot of stuff on the internet you watch educational videos and then one of the things that comes up is this trait of conscientiousness so conscientiousness is your ability to sort of focus on a task for extended periods of time um it also governs things like impulse control so people with low conscientiousness tend to be impulsive and have trouble with follow-through whereas people with high conscientiousness tend to be um you know like disciplined organized and will follow through and so um one of the interesting things is that like people tend to think that certain attributes of uh you know certain attributes are better than others so generally speaking a lot of like the gaming community feels like they have low conscientiousness and therefore they like lost the lottery right so if you're kind of born or nurtured in in a way where your personality forms with high conscientiousness you're actually okay doing things like delaying gratification working hard working towards a goal and following through and then there's us who's like well we don't we're not good at that i'm kind of lazy i'm undisciplined and so people ask me the question is we were you know talking about the five factors like how do i increase my conscientiousness so that's when what today's lecture is going to be about and the last uh attribute is actually neuroticism which is your tendency to worry so people may think that neuroticism which is like your tendency to like suffer up here is a bad thing and it certainly causes suffering but there are a lot of things that show that neuroticism is actually an adaptive trait so people with super low neuroticism are what i think of as like the classic pothead like sit around all day do nothing like not really worry about anything like they don't get worried about stuff they're just super chill and so as a result they don't get motivated to do things because you know they don't really care about the consequences and um so for example doctors or actually medical students is a better way to put it tests very high in neuroticism and hit very high in conscientiousness and the reason for that is because like they were the kids that were worried about getting a b on a test when they were in college which pushed them to study like on friday nights instead of going to parties and they're also kind of hard working so like that combination of traits is what sort of allows people to like be successful medical students or get into medical school so it's not like high neuroticism is better than low neuroticism and oddly enough it's not like low conscientiousness is better than high conscientiousness but in our society we tend to select or reward people who have high conscientiousness so that gets to the crux of today's lecture which is that if i have low conscientiousness am i sol am i screwed or is there something that i can do to boost conscientiousness and so people basically think if i have low conscientiousness like you know i drew the short straw in life what can i do about it so it took me a little while um but it actually turns out that you can improve conscientiousness or at least i think so and here's the best way that i've been able to kind of figure out how okay so let's start by thinking about what actually happens in the mindset of someone who has low conscientiousness okay so um when we're thinking about like conscientiousness like oh sorry yes let's think about low versus high conscientiousness so let's say that like it's a wednesday afternoon and i'm done with my classes and i've got two choices i can play apex legends or i can study for my like test next tuesday right and so in the mind of someone who has high conscientiousness it's a little bit easier for them to study instead of like play a game and um if we think about it like i have two impulses right so like one impulse is like what i want to do and one impulse is like what i don't want to do we're not going to say it's good for me or not good for me because the first thing to understand is like the impulses are what's what i want to do and what i don't want to do and so you kind of get distracted um and you end up going towards ipex legends right so if you have high conscientiousness you choose the thing that you don't want to do you have low conscientiousness you basically give in to the thing that you want to do so you have this impulse to play a video game and you give in to it so if we kind of think about it is there any way to train ourselves to do what we don't or not not do what we don't want to do is there any way to train ourselves to avoid doing the thing that we want to do and there's kind of a a subtle answer what we really mean by that is is there anything that i can do that will set myself and what i want aside because that's basically what we're doing right so if i want to play a video game that's like prioritizing me and like can we set that thinking aside in favor of something else how do we train our minds to set aside what we want in favor of like what's good for us and so the subtle thing there is that it's not necessarily a choice between what's good for me and what i want it's just the key act if you look at the cognitive act it's actually setting aside what you want which is the important thing it's the impulse control which is the important thing and so conscientiousness is associated with with higher degrees of impulse control and so the funny thing is that the answer is actually right in the word okay so if we think about conscientiousness what do we when we think about a person who's conscientious what does that mean right so if we think about like what are the different term what are the different ways in which we use that term to describe people so the first okay so people say aware conscious so it's not necessarily conscious right so it's it's like they think about people who are like hard-working but when when she think when we also think about we think about people who are caring like so if we think about a person who's like very conscientious that person is like thoughtful about other people and so the funny thing there's a really simple way to do to boost conscientiousness which is just to be thoughtful for other people or to i know it sounds kind of weird but like to just be a nice person to be a good person to try to put other people first to be selfless and so this is really subtle because if you think about it like when i do something for someone else like let's say i've got like a pizza right and i've got like this a whole pizza to myself and if i think about it i'm sort of like okay well let me think about what i can do for someone else i can eat the whole pizza myself or i can share the pizza with someone else and in that moment i have an impulse let's say it's eat the pizza all by myself and what i'm doing when i when i care about other people in a very like thoughtful and deliberate way is i'm setting aside my own impulses so i want you guys to think about helping other people and how helping other people almost certainly comes at a cost to yourself right you have to give something up in order to help someone else so if you share something that you have you know you lose half of it if i have a friend who's sick and i make them like you know chicken noodle soup or whatever like lentil stew whatever and i like bring it over there i lose like an hour two of my time i can't play video games during that time i have to go and do something for someone else i essentially expend effort at a cost to myself for the benefit of another person and i know it sounds kind of weird but if you really look at what happens in the mind of someone who helps another person there's a really really key common element which is the avoidance or restraining your impulse to benefit yourself right so if i do anything that's nice for someone else it has to come at a cost to me and that's actually a really wonderful thing because that is what allows us to train conscientiousness okay so let's kind of think about that so then like the tricky thing about the personality models is that um you know people also look at things like empathy right and so they say oh isn't helping other people empathy isn't that what makes you an empathic human being and the short answer is not really and this is why it's a subtle there's a lot of nuance here so empathy is the capacity to feel what someone else is feeling and so people who are naturally empathic naturally like or more helpful towards other people that's not what we're talking about right so what i'm actually talking about the best example of what i'm talking about is the altruistic sociopath so i don't know if you guys know this but sociopathy is another like personality kind of scale it doesn't really fit into the five factor model or it maps onto the five factor model in its own way it's sort of like low agreeableness maybe a certain amount of conscientiousness but the altruistic sociopath is actually like what we're going to look at to understand this so i don't know if you guys know this but there are a lot of people who are like really really good people who are not empathic they just choose to be good people so i've worked with some of these people and a lot of times like the problem with sociopaths is that the ones that get like so if you look at incarceration rates and stuff like that sociopathy is like higher in a prison population but the tricky thing there there's there's some evidence that suggests that like the sociopaths who wind up in prison are the ones that like get caught and aren't actually very good at it um and so they actually may have like a lower iq so so you it is possible to have these like altruistic sociopaths and i see these a lot so i work with a lot of c-suite executives and these people test very highly on the sociopathy scale i myself test highly on the sociopathy scale psychiatrists actually routinely test highly on the sociopathy scale surgeons test highly on the sociopathy scale it's kind of strange right so if you think about what what is it that why are psychiatrists high on the sociopathy scale it's because in a sense we have like a very protective or low level of empathy and what i mean by that is that like when i'm sitting with someone with depression i can't let that person's depression like wash over and affect me i actually need a barrier or it helps if like i can look at their depression like clinically without feeling sad like with them and then feeling like helpless with them so instead of feeling feeling that empathic helplessness it's actually protective for me to like be insulated from that and so if you look at an altruistic sociopath what you see is someone who does a lot of things for other people but also doesn't do it because of empathy so they do it sort of cognitively right so what they do is like eat up here what they say is like they wake up in the morning and they're like okay what can i do oh this will be like something i can do for someone else and like that's a good thing it's not based on a feeling it's sort of based on a cognitive process of choosing to set someone else above you okay and so this is the key thing about boosting conscientiousness is people look at it and they say like okay it's hard for me to train myself to like not watch youtube and study ahead instead i completely agree that's really hard it's like fighting an uphill battle the trick is to use altruism is your tool like that's going to be essentially like the weights that you practice with right so what i want you guys to understand is that if your conscientious is low conscientiousness is low do stuff for other people very simply right so in that process what you're gonna have to do is set aside parts of yourself in favor of other people and by doing that what you're gonna train in your mind is the capacity to set aside what you want and so and the cool thing is if you look at the gaming population like this is actually something that's really awesome about us is that we actually are really good at helping other people like you guys can get off your ass if it involves like doing something substantive for someone else so if we look at that motivational hump that you need to get over to train your conscientiousness once you throw someone else into the picture it actually becomes a lot easier so just to kind of summarize you can absolutely train conscientiousness and the way that you do it is by being a conscientious human being which is to be like nice towards other people and to try to do things for them and the really fascinating thing about this discovery is that this is not like a new idea right so if you really think about it like in the eastern or karmic religions they talk about karma or karma and what they say is like what goes around comes around right so they sort of say that if you do good things for other people like your life will be improved and that's really weird right so like if you want to assume there's some sort of like cosmic principle or god or someone who's like you know using omnipotence to benefit people that they deem to be good that system sort of makes sense but we don't really have any evidence of any of that so let's just scrap all that sort of religious stuff let's try to understand is there like an actual worldly observation that supports this theory of karma which is that like if you do good by other people your life will be improved and the funny thing is that this revelation about conscientiousness is like the perfect link that explains that because what the theory of karma essentially discovered like thousands of years ago was that when i do things for other people i am in training my conscientiousness and by doing things for other people i'm training my mind to be more restrained i'm training my mind to not be a victim to my own desires i'm training my mind to be less impulsive i am being the controller of my mind instead of the mind being the controller of me and what they realize is that the people who consistently do things for other people will i don't know if they put these two pieces together but they made the observation that people who consistently do things for other people their lives start to improve and the reason for that is really simple it's because as you train your conscientiousness like you're able to study more easily you're able to like work harder and clean and be like have better discipline and better follow and then naturally as a consequence of that happening then people like start doing better in their jobs they start doing better in their families they start like they start being more respected like there are a lot of positive things that come out of that and so it's it's really kind of fascinating because like the last thing that i just kind of want to say is that it's interesting that karma is like so you specific and what i mean by that is like how on earth in a cosmic level does me like helping a lady with her groceries improve my life like that doesn't make any sense right there's no like cosmic energy that is going to like wrap around and get to me like we don't have any evidence of that so if we look at it how does the theory of karma work it the only way the theory of karma can work is actually through you because you're the only common element like if i help an old lady over here and then my life gets better over here what's the dot that connects these two things it's you and so the medium of action for karma must be the individual and once we realize that then we realize oh [ __ ] like that makes perfect sense right because now if we look at the the medium of like how we improve our lives through helping others it has to be through us there has to be a change within our brain or body but let's assume brain because that's usually what you know is responsible for stuff so there had you know there has to be a change in your brain that connects helping an old lady with her groceries with like improving your life and i think that missing link is literally this this piece of conscientiousness so it's really fascinating because you know if we look at like how to improve your life we've got this like theory that's thousands of years old which has sort of survived the test of time right so if you think if you look at it like there's a darwinian effect for concepts in human history so the concepts that tend to be like more reliable and successful will be the ones that get propagated through time and the concepts that are like not reliable won't get propagated through time right so if you look at religions for example like horus and zeus aren't like any better than like you know whatever god was around like you know in other cultures so there's like there's a sense that religions will be born and die because those particular like figures won't don't add anything it's some of these core concepts from religion which will actually last through time so the theory of karma has been saying this for thousands of years and what i think is super cool is that now that we understand personality analysis we see this interesting link that okay so the conscientiousness and doing things for other people and improving your own life actually is like kind of explained through our current understanding of like validated science around personality so at the end of the day how do you improve your life how do you improve your conscientiousness how do you become a hard worker when you can't restrain your impulses and you can't do it for yourself you recruit a certain amount of altruism you recruit doing it for someone else and when you do it for someone else literally what you have to do is set aside what you want or things that benefit you are giving in to your impulses for the sake of another human being and the more you do that you train your muscle that sets aside your impulses and the more you train your muscle to set aside your impulses the more conscientious you will become the more conscientious you become the more you will be able to study and like work and read instead of playing video games or watching youtube or netflix or whatever and that's really like it's that simple so i've been you know i put this theory together like about six seven months ago and i've been piloting it with a couple of the clients that i work with and it actually seems to be working pretty well that when people start to put themselves like second instead of putting themselves first in their interpersonal relationships they start to like do things like there's one person i was working with that has a degree and hasn't had a job in eight years so they like finished their degree and they like never got a job and you know for a little while they were just working on repairing their interpersonal relationships and like now they have a job using their degree for the first time and it's like it's night and day for them so here's what i'd say you know hopefully this works but this is where you guys have to try it out right so like this is where i can propose to you guys i mean i'm not the speaker of truth this is just the hypothesis that i've come up with which i feel pretty confident about because i think it's sort of supported by like eastern theory and western science it's sort of anecdotally tested in like half a dozen of people and based on my own explorations of mine and frankly the healthy gamers so i'm also a great example of this where i have low conscientiousness right so like i suck at this stuff i have a vata mind and so if you think about it what is it that keeps me motivated is like thinking about you guys so like over the last week i've written 31 000 words of like maybe a non-fiction book and like what motivates me to do that instead of playing video games it's the idea that like oh my god like i may die in like a year or two years or five years or 10 years and it would be a real pity if i spent all my time learning this stuff and like some random accident happened and like i didn't you know like it's weird like i was like thinking about that and like i only have a limited amount of time on this earth so i better get busy because i won't be around forever right and i don't mean that to be like you know i don't want people to get sad and stuff i mean it's like it's really like a cognitive sort of thing this is where thankfully the sociopathy within me is it's nice because i can sit with that thought like without getting overwhelmed it's just like a real practicality right but it's actually thinking about you guys that motivates me to work like it's it's thinking about you guys and trying to help other human beings that restrains my conscientiousness which is like pretty low because i'm a supervisor person right i'm bad at follow through and all that kind of good stuff too and so it kind of works so i encourage you guys to test it out right so like try it out for yourselves and see what happens if you start putting other people first and if you do put other people first like notice what's happening in your mind when you do that notice that every time you put someone else first you have to put yourself second and that putting yourself second is setting aside that impulse and so every time you do that you're getting a little bit stronger you're gaining a little bit of xp you're leveling up just a tiny well you're not leveling up because that's like you know incremental but you know you're getting xp and then like what you'll do is you'll notice a level up at some point right like you'll notice that like oh wow i'm actually able to like clean my room now because it's weird i wasn't able to do that that's a level up i'm actually able to put together my resume i'm actually able to apply for the job i'm actually able to learn this extra thing that i've always wanted to learn like if you're a programmer and you like we're like oh i'd really like to learn this and you never get around to it so try and put other people first and if it doesn't work as a diablo the divine has a great question if it doesn't work shocking in the meantime with your failure you have made the world a better place oh [ __ ] sucks um if you guys want to work through some of this stuff right so we teach these concepts the whole reason that we have a coaching program is so that like you can work with a coach to actually like problem solve your particular issues and um kind of work through those things like with someone and then like it tends to be pretty effective so coaching is a great way to sort of explore like testing and improving your conscientiousness overcoming laziness um figuring out like how to implement changes in your life and things like that they'll also help you find a little bit about your dharma and all that kind of good stuff [Music] okay [Music] uh

Channel: HealthyGamerGG

Views: 203,149

Rating: 4.9769301 out of 5

Keywords: mental health, drk, dr kanojia, healthygamergg, healthy gamer gg, twitch, psychiatrist, conscientiousness, stop procrastination, overcome procrastination, how to boost productivity, increase productivity, increase productivity at work, study habits, study tips, productivity, productivity tips

Id: aKHov_Nuhso

Length: 25min 20sec (1520 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 19 2021