Why Do You Only Get Motivated After Midnight? | Night Owls

almost as you get fatigued by like towards 4 p.m 6 p.m 7 p.m it becomes like easier for you to start studying and then you stay up all night you pound caffeine and then you kind of get into what i would call like the fatigue groove for lack of a better term okay so we're gonna talk a little bit about why is it that you get a ton of motivation when you're going to bed at night um and why when you wake up in the morning like you don't actually do anything okay so a couple of different dimensions that we're going to talk about one is like so our question is why do we get motivated at night but like not during the day so we're going to start by understanding some stuff about neuroscience we're going to talk about one aspect of psychology and then we're just going to talk about a couple of general principles this is almost more spiritual about clarity of mind and like where motivation comes from and we're going to talk about behavioral calculations as well okay so the first thing to understand i'm going to tell you guys about an experiment okay so they took a bunch of mice and what they were doing is trying to assess there's a part of our brain called the nucleus accumbens and the nucleus accumbens is the part of our brain that actually manages reward and behavior okay so it's a very dopamine it's like a very like it's one of the dopamine circuits in the brain so a lot of times people are talking about dopamine dopamine dopamine like dopamine is the reason that like i get addicted to video games i need to detox off of dopamine i'm in dopamine exhaustion we talk about dopamine everyone talks about dopamine dopamine so in the nucleus accumbens there's dopamine but the interesting thing is that all of this stuff has been oversimplified so i'm going to add some complexity to it but even i'm going to be oversimplifying so they took a group of mice and they basically did a really interesting experiment where they injected different stuff into the nucleus accumbens of mice so generally speaking they took mice and they gave them two options of food one is like a high carbohydrate super tasty like twinkie pellet it's basically like a pellet that's like a twinkie and the other is like a regular food and they normally have to work a little bit harder they have to like press a lever to get like the twinkie versus like the kale salad okay so generally speaking when you give mice this choice what'll happen is they'll like they'll go for the twinkie they'll go for the high carbohydrate nutrient dense food and they'll eat it and they'll be happy little mice fat little mice too so what some researchers did is they uh injected a certain amount of dopamine blocker into the brains of these mice okay so we're gonna kind of go back to this for a second and let's see what happened so i'm gonna have to figure out how to draw this so let's say you've got a mouse and then the default is high energy pellet and then the other option is low energy pellet so normally in the situation that our normal situation let's call it blue so normally a mice goes a mouse goes this way they they choose the high dopamine pellet okay so then what what researchers did is they they blocked dopamine in the nucleus accumbens so in the nucleus accumbens of mice they took a dopamine blocker and they blocked dopamine and what they actually found when you block the action of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens is that mice will actually go this way okay so if we blocked opening that's because these are a little bit harder to get the other way you can kind of think about it is that they have no preference for the high energy pellet over the low energy pellet and then they did something really interesting they took a third chemical adenosine and they actually blocked the action of adenosine in the nucleus accumbens and what they found is that the mouse went back to the high energy palette okay so now we're going to talk a little bit because like you know neuroscience is complicated but you know most people talk about dopamine don't talk about in a complicated sense so there's three states that we can kind of think of in terms of dopamine and adenosine okay so let's just talk actually for a second about what adenosine is adenosine is essentially a waste product in the brain so we have a um we have this like the the fuel of our brain is something called atp and the waste product after we burn a molecule of atp is to wind up with adenosine and we know we don't really i mean adenosine does all kinds of stuff so i'm oversimplifying things but the other thing that we know is as you as the day goes on so like if we think about um you know time of the day in adenosine okay what happens over time as we go throughout our day is adenosine slowly climbs and then we go to sleep and then what our brain does is clear adenosine from the brain and then this is waking up so as the day goes on we increase in our adenosine so what i would kind of say and if we kind of think about dopamine for a second okay so when you wake up first thing in the morning and you feel really excited to play a game so let's say this is dopamine and let's say this is time i'm super excited to play a game i really want to play dota there's a new patch the first game of dota i play gives me a lot of dopamine right this is an oversimplification but dopamine signal is a better way to put it and then the more games of dota i play essentially my dopamine starts to go down so this is why when you kind of look at like behavioral reinforcement right so this is why people will say like at the beginning of the day like that's when you like if you're productive at the beginning you're going to have a good day whereas if you start playing video games like it's a lot easier to do work for two hours and then start gaming than it is to play for two hours stop and then start doing work so our dopamine generally speaking like we get more bored of crap by the end of the day we're excited to do things but by like 7 p.m 8 p.m you're like eh if you've been playing games all day you don't really feel like doing much right and then we go to sleep over here and then we kind of wind up back here when we wake up if we're lucky so if we kind of look at it there are kind of three states of dopamine and adenosine throughout the day and remember this is a waste product right so we can have high dopamine and low adenosine so this is in the am we can have low dopamine and low adenosine we'll get to this state in a second or what we can have is low dopamine and high adenosine okay and so if we kind of think about it when we block so this is a state where when we block dopamine and we still have adenosine remember we end up going for the low energy pellet right so when we block adenosine as well then we end up either going for both are we going for end up going for the high energy pellet so you can almost think about adenosine and dopamine as having antagonistic properties so adenosine will blunt the effect of dopamine okay so what is the dopamine counter it is adenosine okay is the dopamine counter so you guys may wonder a little bit about this and why this actually works so like let me give you guys kind of like an example so if you guys ever like studied like let's say you've got a final the next day right what time do you usually start studying if you're like me you don't start studying first thing in the morning for the final the next day you procrastinate until 2 pm 4 pm you're like around you're like i should study i should study i shouldn't study and then once oh gg once uh 6 pm rolls around you're kind of like once 6 pm rolls around you're kind of um you kind of like oh man like like it's somehow like easy like as as time goes on you get like a little bit less distracted and like then suddenly it's like easy for you to study right in the morning it's actually like super hard for you to study but almost as you get fatigued by like towards 4 p.m 6 p.m 7 p.m it becomes like easier for you to start studying and then you stay up all night you pound caffeine and then you kind of get into what i would call like the fatigue groove for lack of a better term okay so like the fatigue groove is like when you're actually like really functional but you're kind of tired and in a weird way you can get into this fatigue group easier than you can like at the start of the day when it's so easy to get distracted does that sort of make sense it's almost like games are more tempting at like noon than they are at like 6 p.m or 7 p.m and then like you kind of get tired and then it's sort of like you get into this weird fatigue groove and what i'd call that fatigue groove is essentially this this adenosine buildup throughout the day so as like our day goes goes on and we kind of think about it this way so like let's call dopamine green okay so dopamine kind of starts out high easy to get distracted video games and then let's call adenosine yellow and then like you kind of start adenosine over here and then like this is sort of like 6 p.m and this is when you start studying and then you pull you study all night you're kind of fatigued and then like with 7 a.m rolls around your exam is in an hour and then you kick yourself right you're like man if i had started like four hours earlier six hours earlier if i only started studying a little bit earlier i could have gotten so much more but it was so hard to study so much earlier and i think part of that is adenosine so it's interesting because what you know our ability to get distracted by stuff oh sh i'm sorry i couldn't see this this so this is dopamine this is adenosine and then you know so you start out with dopamine over here high and then over time it it goes down and then with adenosine let's call it yellow and then it increases and then this is kind of your 6 p.m switch where you start studying okay and this is also where like we can kind of think a little bit about night owls right so there's actually like there are a lot of situations where we can see people are actually more productive like later in the day and that may have something to do with like adenosine production in the brain and so then the question becomes like what's the relationship between these two things and it's that when we're vulnerable to our dopaminergic activities early in the day like when you feel excited to play games you kind of want to watch stuff like it's really hard to work and then once you kind of get into this like fatigue groove in the middle of the day the dopaminergic pull decreases on its own and then like adenosine because remember adenosine has a blunting effect on dopamine right that's what the key thing about this rat study is that it demonstrated how dope adenosine is the dopamine counter so adenosine is a waste product in the brain and that sort of makes sense too because the more that our brain does things the more energy it uses up and the more energy it uses up the more tired it feels and the less it feels like doing things so since adenosine is the dopamine counter as the day goes on it blunts our ability to like respond to dopamine or be controlled by dopamine and then we can start studying it like 6 pm after procrastinating all day okay so that's the first thing so the first reason why i think you can sometimes get motivated is because your motivation gets distracted by dopaminergic activities early in the day and then as you start to get fatigued like you don't feel like you know the dopaminergic pull isn't there you're not thinking about playing games anymore you're not like oh i really want to do this so this would be kind of fun and so as you're as all of the the desires and the dopaminergic controls starts to fade into the background because of elevated levels of adenosine then like the deeper motivation can start to shine forth because it's not just this dopaminergic crap anymore does that make sense so that's one thing that has to do with neuroscience so let now let's talk a little bit about future discounting so if we talk about you know what the real problem is motivation is a feeling and it increases at night right so motivation increases at night but now here's the question does behavior increase at night right so when you feel super motivated at night do you engage in the behavior interesting right so when we when we kind of when we go to bed at night there's a really interesting thing about motivation which is that there's no cost motivation so our motivation can like increase unchecked it can spiral out of control you're sitting there like late at night and you're thinking like oh tomorrow i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do this it's gonna be great it's gonna be awesome like i have all of this motivation and in our brain there's no cost because you're not giving anything up you're not actually doing anything so it's like your motivation can like rise to epic proportions because there's no cost to the motivation there's no balance to the motivation now when you wake up the next morning what's the situation the next am now you have a choice motivation versus video game so let's say that at night i think about oh man i'm gonna write a novel right so this is the other thing creative stuff right happens a lot at night i'm gonna write a novel so now i have a choice i can write a novel or i can play a video game and now suddenly there's a cost to the motivation right so if i if i if i write a novel for one hour have i written a novel no have i written one percent of a novel no there's no like cost benefit like there's no like what have i done in an hour so my brain is sitting there and it's doing this kind of goes back to this other calculation like the behavioral calculation and my brain is sitting there in the morning and it's thinking like okay if i like can i write a novel now no like can i write a novel in an hour no can i write a novel in two hours no can i write a novel in four hours no so can i actually write the novel in the morning no now can i play a game in an hour yup can i get a little bit of that can i get that dopamine can i get me a little bit that dopamine please ma'am sir thank you yes please and thank you yeah absolutely easy easy so now when in the light of day when you actually have the opportunity to engage in the behavior there's an opportunity cost now because at night there's no opportunity cost so your your your you know your motivation can just fly through the roof because it doesn't cost you anything it's like free like i can and then you get more inspired you think about how great it's gonna be i'm gonna have this idea i'm gonna have that idea like this character's gonna do this we're gonna do plot twists here it's gonna be like no one's gonna realize what's gonna happen it's gonna get picked up there's gonna be a bidding war between netflix and hbo for my awesome new novel it's gonna be great it's like twilight meets game of thrones it's gonna be like the most epic thing since harry potter it's gonna be so awesome there's no cost to any of it right and then come the light of day now suddenly there's a cost like twilight meets game of thrones holy crap that's gonna take a lot of work like how do i even do that they're gonna be different vampire houses like what's up with that how's that gonna work ah it's overwhelming i don't know how to start so let me just play a video game at least that's easy easy easy let me just do this so in your brain you have this behavioral calculation we've talked about the doubt march endowed paper a lot right so if you guys remember that paper it's also on our discord and things like that there's a behavioral calculation that in in the night doesn't it's like it's like a an equation that only has one side of the equal sign so it can the motivation goes out of control because there's no cost but come the light of day now suddenly there's a cost it's like you're going to sleep at night and you're like man i'm going to wake up tomorrow i'm going to work out first thing and then you wake up tomorrow and it's like am i going to work out right now because do you work out in the middle of the night like when you feel so motivated to write that novel do you actually get up and write do you actually work out no you don't do any of those things when the cost actually becomes part of the scale so we've got you know a set of scales right and then like the motivation is just you know there's a ton of motivation over here so it's easy because it's empty so motivation easy but now we start adding a cost during the day and then suddenly this is gone and then our motivation goes up or whatever you know this wins and then it's gg okay so next thing to consider so there's like a future discounting problem there's an opportunity cost problem uh it's not really the future discounting is another one of these principles where like um our brain chooses the reason i call it future discounting is because our brain chooses an immediate gain over an uncertain long-term gain so like i can get some immediate satisfaction right now but come the light of morning like i don't actually know if anyone's ever going to bid war over this because i've been writing for an hour and it sucks there's no plot twist like i can't you know there's no it's not successful after one hour but if i play a game it's like easy done so now what i want to talk a little bit about is almost what i would call spiritual it's not really spiritual but it's not scientific and i think like the yogic folks like understood this stuff like a little bit better and so what i'm going to talk about now about why you know this is the third reason why motivation is higher at night is shower thoughts okay so if you think about shower thoughts like what's so interesting about the shower like when you're in the shower you're in this kind of like con state of consciousness where you're not really distracted you can't be on your phone you can't really like do a whole lot with your mind there's like no mental distraction and there's some amount of physical roteness right you're just like hopefully like shampooing yourself cleaning your hair things like that and and then what happens is like this combination of factors leads to profound thinking and now we all let now let's look at the situation we go to bed so like you know i i mean if you're on your bed you're not gonna have i mean if you're on your phone in bed you're not going to have motivation you guys see that if you're sitting there watching something or browsing something you're not going to feel an ounce of motivation it's when you go to bed it's when you put down your phone there's nothing left to mentally distract you so you're just sitting with yourself there isn't necessarily like a physical roteness but there is sort of like a physical pull or grounding let's say maybe that's a better feeling right and so we see a very analogous situation to actually showering and then we result in like motivation and thinking right this is the situation in bed and so the reason i call this kind of like spiritual in nature is because i think yoga like the yogis and stuff were the ones that really looked at these different states of mind and figured out how do we cultivate this kind of state of mind and so what we can see is that a lot of that motivation naturally bubbles forth when we are free from distraction when we have no dopaminergic options at hand and we are being with ourself right so this is like a phrase that we use where when you go for a walk in nature when you shower when you lay in bed at night and the interesting thing is that even like technically someone else can be there like you can lay in bed with your partner or whatever but as long as you guys aren't interacting the state will come so the reason i call it spiritual is because it's about like this is the angle where i think about cultivating a particular state of consciousness so if you want that kind of motivation to hit you in other parts of the day we already figured out showering right so this one is like there's even like shower thoughts is a thing we see it when we go to bed at night but you can actually cultivate these states by walking in nature by doing away with the dopaminergic distractions right because at the end of the day this is going to increase dopamine or like when you're on your phone it's going to increase open when you play video games it's going to increase dopamine and so this kind of goes back to like this state over here where these meditative practices this is actually the ideal state so this is why if you really look at people like i for example do my most productive work in the morning where if i if i spend 15 minutes on my phone at the beginning of my day if i sit down at my computer my product productivity is going to be like at 80 percent of what it was sometimes even less the longer i spend at my computer first thing in the morning the more screwed i am for the day whereas most of my like thinking my high quality thinking happens before i hop on the dopamine train so avoid the dopamine train okay takeaways number one avoid the dopamine train number two adenosine gets you off the dopamine train so this is the fatigue groove but the problem with the fatigue groove is that you're fatigued right it's not like adenosine like adenosine is a waste product so at this point like you're fatigued so even though you can work you're not as distracted the quality of your work is going to be like 60 to 80 right and so number three is like what you really want to cultivate and this is like where kind of meditation comes in is this state of mind so this is the fatigue groove this is when we get distracted and then this state of mind with low dopamine and low adenosine when your mind is fresh where it's super capable and at the same time it's not distracted it's not being dopaminergic we're creating space to be with ourselves where we're not on our phones we don't have mental distractions and often times it can really help to have a physical roteness or a grounding activity this is why walking is really really healthy for you or hiking right you can think a lot or awesome really deep thoughts when you're going for a hike if it's not physically intensive to the point where it's occupying your mind so if i'm rock climbing for example like i'm not going to be thinking deep philosophical thoughts or creative thoughts because all of my mental focus is going to be on the actual physical activity but that's the thing is that there are some activities like showering or being in bed or going for a walk that have a certain physical grounding aspect that don't demand your mental attention so your mind can be free and then you'll start to have motivation questions so what was number three oh yeah seek out you know low dopamine low adenosine states and these states have these components that we talked about over here right which is no dopamine distractions physical grounding and what was this oh yeah like mental space let's call it and the other thing that you can do is like this is what we call being with yourself and meditation helps a lot so like don't start the first hour of the day like don't use technology that's the biggest thing you can do questions i personally prefer showering in the morning but to each their own oh my god so many questions hold on hold on hold on okay here's here's the okay so big mouth fringe says what should we do tldr so here's the thing i can tell you what to do but you have to understand right so here's something to unders here's something to understand behavioral change does not come with information transmission behavioral change comes from understanding so we see this a lot in addictions where like people say one day they'll wake up and they'll say enough is enough and if you ask them how did you quit alcohol they just say i woke up one day and i realized enough is enough now i could tell them every day before that enough is enough you've got to stop drinking and they're not going to do it so the first thing you should do is understand this the first thing that you should do is study yourself the first thing you should do is see if what i'm saying is correct do you find the fatigue groove what happens first thing when you wake up in the morning experiment first don't worry about doing because who the hell knows like this may not apply to you experiment first understand first explore first see if you can find these three things to cultivate this kind of like motivational you know triad of physical grounding but not physically demanding stuff free of mental distraction or mental space and to be free of mental distractions see what happens in your day when for the first hour of the day you do not touch a piece of technology what happens in your mind what happens to your motivation right because at the end of the day if you want to optimize performance you don't need you don't want to use the crutch of adenosine and the fatigue groove to get stuff done that's what has you operating at 70 percent what are some good books to learn all this stuff and also more heavily focused on disorders there aren't unfortunately there aren't really books so that's why we built dr k's guide because like what i'm offering you guys is a synthesis of knowledge i will link to you however two papers which i think um for those of you who are interested in adenosine so there are a couple of references there but this stuff i mean this is an amalgamation of books right this is not just books is the other thing is a lot of what i teach is not books it's like scientific papers so you can you what you have to do is like read a lot of scientific papers and like stitch things together and the part of the what we teach is like you know you can get a phd in neuroscience you'll learn a third of this lecture you can get a phd in psychology you'll learn a third of this lecture you can spend five years studying in india and you'll get a third of this lecture i don't mean i just genuinely don't have like it's not like this is in one book like the whole point is like this is an amalgamation of knowledge um what if my work is on technology then don't work for the first week first hour of the day i'm serious just don't work for the first hour don't do your job right you can do your job later so spend the first hour of the day cooking cleaning exercising straightening up your place running an errand you know good questions how do twitch streamers that are addicted to video games become successful then excellent question because their success is tied to the dopaminergic process so this is a fantastic question right so if your material success is tied to the dopaminergic circuit in the nucleus accumbens then you can be successful and do this easy the challenge is that for most of us the dopaminergic hit does not lead to material success so this is also where i mean they have their fair amount of suffering too okay so but this is where if we look at like you know part of the job of being a successful twitch streamer is to spend time on twitter spend time on youtube spend time playing games these are all dopaminergic activities that's why there are successful twitch streamers because the world has evolved to a point where dopaminergic activities can be financially rewarded video games aren't a distraction anymore they're now a job and so what people have managed to do is give in to their dopamine dopaminergic circuits they've become successful on twitch and they're a mess they suffer on the inside unless they can learn how to set limits right they like they like internally like they're burnt out because like they're just they're stuck in the dopamine loops they don't feel like they're in control of their life all this kind of stuff not even music in the morning i guess you can listen to music how do i reset the cycle from working all night what i would say is that you should try to stay up and then like go to bed like at like 6 p.m or 7 p.m so in my experience if you want to reset your sleep schedule we've got a video about this by the way so if you look at the human brain insomnia and circadian rhythm as a human being is it is easier to stay up when you are tired than it is to go to sleep when you are not this is the key thing to understand about resetting your sleep schedule there's one thing to understand it's that staying up is easier than going to bed so if my circadian rhythm is all off and i lay down at 9 00 pm i may stay awake for like four hours and then there's like gg nothing i can do about it whereas it's way easier to stay up all night right like it's it's easier to go to stay awake 12 hours longer than when you should go to bed than it is to go to sleep 12 hours earlier than you know you should go to sleep so like it's really hard to wake up at 8 a.m and like go to sleep at 10 a.m way easier to wake up at 8 a.m and stay up until 10 a.m the next day i know i'm four pixels trying to figure out why okay there there we go okay so i would say try to stay up until like you know 6 p.m or 7 p.m and then you're gonna be so exhausted that you should have no trouble falling asleep or hopefully it'll be easier and then what will happen is you'll sleep for a long time and it'll be easier to wake up in the morning so i'd say like go to sleep at like 6 p.m 7 p.m stay up for like 36 hours you have to be careful about you know driving and stuff i wouldn't drive or anything like that so don't do anything that's dangerous because you're gonna be heavily impaired and then what you want to do is like set an alarm for like 12 hours from you know when you go to bed so like set an alarm for like 6 a.m or 7 a.m you may feel kind of groggy and weird when you wake up um but then that'll be like the first step in the right direction and then you have to power through that day and then it'll be easier to go to sleep at like 10 p.m so that's how you fix it someone's asking how do i avoid the dopamine training in the morning it's so hard yeah you're absolutely right it is very hard so i think the biggest problem with the dopamine train is your phone so really think about what is your phone for right what is the function of your phone why do we keep it with us we keep it with us because of emergencies what if there's an emergency but like the likelihood of emergency is very very low so what i'd recommend for people who are trying to avoid the dopamine train in the morning is just keep the devices away from you like make the burden of reaching your device very hard don't sleep with your phone in the same room and it's like what if something happens in the middle of the night and someone calls me well then like or if you want to i guess you can put it at the other end of the room and like keep it away from you so it's not with you when you're going to bed at night and it's not like within arms reach when you wake up in the morning and the second thing is like just be aware like as you wake up understand what's happening like you want to go and you sit down at your computer like that's what you want to do with every fiber of your being you know it's like and be like what the hell is that let me see how long i can sit here without going to the computer and watch that struggle within yourself it's going to be like this serpent like uncoiling and like threatening you and it's going gonna like pressure you so much the pressure is crazy and then your mind is gonna find this like internal like weird you're gonna trick yourself into thinking it's okay to do you guys see what i'm saying like you're gonna be like it's not that big of a deal your mind is gonna slippery like twist this way and that to get you to the computer if you just say to yourself like i'm not gonna use the computer for an hour your mind will go into absolute rebellion and it'll it'll push you it'll say that's stupid don't do it and when that doesn't work it'll be like it's not that big of a deal just do it it's like like you can start tomorrow like whatever you watch what your mind does it'll turn against you in every fiber of its being and that's the dopamine craving it's like the addict that's looking for something and just be like what the is this it's crazy then the other thing that you can do so you can struggle there but you're gonna fail if you struggle for too long i'd say like you know brush your teeth take a shower if you can whatever get dressed then just leave the house without your phone go for a walk in your neighborhood get dressed and just walk around the block 15 minutes 20 minutes as you're walking around the block think about okay i gotta make breakfast i'll make coffee like whatever go back and then like lay out a very simple plan don't overshoot it right don't think about all the things you have to do today your goal is to make it to one hour you're gonna make your food you're gonna have your coffee then you're going to sit down and then then you pull out a to-do list okay what am i going to do over the next two hours don't make your to-do list for the day you're screwed if you make a to-do list for the day you're screwed do you know why because if it's too loose for the day you don't have to start now you can play games for a couple of hours you can start like 2 p.m 4 p.m 6 pm do this for the day don't make it two deals for the day just what am i gonna do this next hour what is the next right step this is a meditation practice that i do myself so here's my meditation for the day it's gonna be kind of weird it's to ask yourself what is the next best step what is the next best step that's it ask yourself this question again and again and again what is the next best step and the reason i include next and best is because sometime i don't know if this kind of makes sense maybe actually what i say to myself what is the next best thing i can do that's the that's the practice i realized i left a piece out what is the next best thing i can do and the important thing about that is it's not about what is objectively best it is about what is the next best thing that i can do so it acknowledges for a moment that you don't have to be perfect it acknowledges for a moment that you don't have to start studying for your test right now but if i can't start studying for my tests can i toss in a load of laundry can i do some laundry if i can't do laundry can i go for a walk okay then it's a second walk chat i cannot tell you guys i will go for three walks during the day and the reason i go for three walks for during the day is because unless i go for a walk i'm gonna fall into gaming but i can like physically i can force myself to walk 10 feet put on my shoes and walk out the door and once i walk out the door the desire to game disappears you guys get that like the key to building a successful like action throughout the day or habit is not doing the whole action it's just boarding the train to the easy part because once it's i have never in my life taken two steps outside the door with my shoes on being dressed turned around and walked back in in fact at that point it feels really awkward and difficult to do that i don't think i could do it so sometimes what happens in our mind is we think about what goal we need to meet it's not about the goal all you have to do is get far enough to like let the train take you the rest of the way you just have to board the train it's all about which train am i boarding am i boarding the dota train or i'm boarding the walk train and then as you walk okay fine you resisted for 15 minutes 20 minutes come back okay let's eat something so you sit down it's just like you know when you walk inside once again it's like a battle of wills for like five seconds do i go into like my my room where the computer is or do i walk into the kitchen that's all it takes if i walk into the kitchen then it's easy i boarded the kitchen train right and then in that way you will build up like the life that you want like one painstaking struggle at a time some days you'll win some days you'll lose and so it comes back to what is the next best thing i can do i've played two i've wasted two hours playing video games can i resist and can i actually get up and go for a walk if you can't do it no big deal so this is your meditation what is the next best thing i can do what's next what do i need to do anything any tiny thing that is the best thing that i am capable of let me do that thing got it do music or books help or hurt the dopamine dopaminergic system generally speaking i think they're like positive because what they do is they get us away from the things that are like super toxic right so like they get us away from games and stuff like so i think music can be very inspiring like you can use your music very judiciously so i tend to use music very judiciously i don't have it on all the time i listen to music and i listen to it intentionally because music can put you in a particular mood so before i stream like i oftentimes listen to music to get in the right mood i'll listen to some like pageants and stuff too so like like devotional music because that creates a certain move sometimes i'll listen to kanye because that creates a certain mood you can use music to cultivate a particular mood so go for a walk for 15 minutes and like have like a you know a nice inspiring playlist and then like you'll get back and you'll kind of do it right so for people who are saying my work involves a computer so here's a wild thing you can do this is tough you can have a different computer for your work in a different computer for your gaming okay now even if you have one computer so this is literally what i did so for people who are struggling so if you're like a programmer and you find that like it's really hard okay so let me let me think about how to say this so a lot of taking control of your life and doing the right things in the day is avoiding getting on the dopamine dopamine training right the second you pick up your phone and you open up twitter or something else you've lost 15 minutes you've lost an hour even you browse and you browse and you browse and then like the sun goes down it's a gg the second you sit down on your computer it's so easy to just open up a damn tab and like all these browsers are getting smart they know what you like to read so the second you open up a tab one click is all it takes and then like it shows you stuff like your homepage even have suggested readings for you right like even phones nowadays have like this this thing that you can't disable where if you swipe in one direction it gives you a feed and then it's gg so if you if you're a programmer or something your job is on your computer how do you avoid like falling into the trap of like the dopamine or your crap how do you avoid logging into steam or like you know booting up this video game or like pulling up youtube or whatever and so the thing that i actually did so like i would say you can have two computers if you can financially like afford that even when i was in medical school i had one computer but what i would what i did have is like two desks or two spaces in my desks so i had like two da it wasn't even like a folding table and like a crappy desk so you can actually get that and what i would literally do is pick up my laptop and i had like my gaming station and i had my like working station so my working station was a large desk where i had like books and stuff like that i'd stick my laptop in the back and when i was ready to play games i would literally pick up my laptop move to the gaming station plug in a proper mouse plug in my like head uh like headphones or or speakers or whatever and then i like game at that station and it was it was like i'd slide my chair over and even that can make a big difference so i think if your job involves your computer as best as you can try to separate the two so you can separate the physical spaces so that is like an important part of like habit and environment you can also create different logins right you can have a professional login and a work login because that also centers your mind and sort of anchors your mind in a particular mode you have professional login and gaming login and you don't log into your gaming login until you're done with your work for the day you like time things from like nine to five there are these kinds of behavioral anchors that you can actually use that are the opposite of exactly what these developers use to get you hooked right so like disable your feeds like this is also where like you think about your phone like do you use your phone for work maybe get a second phone have one phone for work or one phone for you know personal stuff if you use your phone for work like this is the problem with having devices that do everything because the more our devices do everything the easier it is to slip from one thing into another this is a problem for content creators too because since they do twitter for professional reasons and they do twitter for personal reasons it blends one into the other and so you're on twitter for like six hours a day like having fun and absorbing toxicity from like people on the internet and you're screwed so separate things out as much as you can there's a set of really interesting experiments that was done by um i forget who it is there's a set of these like experiments that was done on rats to explore like dystopia and overcrowding i forget who it is i think some sir someone so i think he's like some kind of like noble in england or something so he did this experiment where he tried to create a rat utopia okay and so what he did is he created a space where he gave the rats as much food as they wanted as much water as they wanted and then he just saw what happened and basically like the rats like over bred and then like they started like degenerating as a society they started falling apart so they would like eat as much as they wanted to they started like breeding like they were like all these like terrible things happening like uh rat mothers would have babies and they would just like abandon them in like the mess of rats okay and so like all kinds of like bad things were happening the one set of rats yeah it's calhoun thank you the one set of rats that retained their sanity were the ones that could block off their space from the mass of rats so most of the rats would like congregate in this like courtyard where there was unlimited food and it was just like a cesspool it's basically like the internet and then there were like some rats that sort of maintained like healthy family structures they engaged in good grooming behaviors they also like took care of their kids and stuff and those were the ones that essentially like found corners of the world and walled themselves off and like would go out to eat and then would come back so even within rats there's this kind of idea that the ones that could maintain some kind of boundary were the ones that were healthy now big criticism of calhoun's experiments which i you know i'm falling into is that people over interpreted the rat utopia to like human dynamics which is a little bit unfair but i think we know from also like theories of psychology and stuff that like setting good boundaries like having good social media hygiene having good technology hygiene having good relationship hygiene setting limits with your technology usage setting limits with your narcissistic parents all of those things can actually be really really healthy so learn to set limits learn to set boundaries use whatever tools you can to kind of set those boundaries and that's what you should do if you're a programmer what about some some reading in the first hour is that also a no-go i would actually steer clear of it if you can so i would use the first hour of the day to like cook eat shower exercise do yoga plan laundry some kind of should be some kind of cleaning activity some kind of exercise just try not to stimulate your mind at all don't give it anything to distract it take care of all the rote stuff you'll be amazed at how much of a difference it makes what if it makes me anxious i don't know what you're referring to jonathan's but that's okay right so life cannot be the avoidance of anything that makes you know you can't avoid all the things that make you anxious just not gonna work you

Channel: HealthyGamerGG

Views: 31,089

Rating: 4.9922986 out of 5

Keywords: mental health, drk, dr kanojia, healthygamergg, healthy gamer gg, twitch, psychiatrist

Id: jiIhOgpOWcA

Length: 47min 4sec (2824 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2021