HealthyGamerGG - 5 Habits that Changed My Life

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

Dr. K talks about the 5 Habits that changed his life from pacing, taking time to think, cutting back caffeine, and more! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/healthygamergg/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With these five habits, I actually was able to make a substantial change in my life with kind of like a minimal effort investment. So one of the things that I want to talk to you all about today are habits. So I'm going to share with you all five habits that I've kind of implemented over the last couple of years that have drastically altered my productivity and my wellness and success and all that kind of stuff. I think these habits may apply to you. This may be useful for you if you're kind of like me. and what I actually struggled with a lot was building new habits. So what I sort of found for myself is that, first of all, I thought building habits was important, right? So I recognize that every day that I'm using like willpower to overcome particular shortcomings of mine, like it was a slog.

The second thing is that I'm also someone who really, really struggles to build habits because I struggle with consistency and things like that. It was just really hard. You know, I try to exercise. I'd try to eat healthy. I'd try to do all this stuff. and it was just like hard for me. And so the habits that I want to share with you all today are five things that I would call easy.

With these five habits, I actually was able to make a substantial change in my life with kind of like a minimal effort investment. So the first habit that I want to share with y'all is not using technology for like 30 to 60 minutes when you wake up in the morning. So for the first half hour to hour of my day, I do my level best to not use any kind of technology.

You know, we've grown up in such a technological society where we feel like we have to use technology or technology is always at our fingertips or there's like so much value from technology. And I didn't really realize how little value technology offers until like I started really paying attention to things like when I would go to an ashram, right? So I'd go to a monastery and I'd study yoga for a while, right? So I'm meditating and stuff like that. And there's a very little technology footprint then. And that's when I really realized, oh, I actually like don't need technology. Now it's fine for me to say, okay, so start off your day using technology for 30 to 60 minutes. But the truth is that's hard. Why is it hard? Because

technology is addictive. So instead of trying to change anything, I just paid attention to what happened when I started using technology. So when you wake up first thing in the morning, you're kind of sluggish. You don't really feel like working, but you need to work today. So what I sort of noticed was that the first reason that I would use technology was not out of any recreational stuff. It was actually like due to like legitimate reasons. So the first thing that I would do is like check my email or look at my calendar and try to figure out, okay, what do I have to do I have to do pretty productive, right? You have to figure out, okay, during the day, like, do I need, do I have an hour to shower? Do I have half an hour to shower?

Like, what do I need to do today? But then what I sort of found is as I looked at my day when I first wake up in the morning, how do you think that makes me feel? So when you wake up first thing in the morning and you open up your calendar and you open up your email and there are all these tasks you have to do and like you've got all these meetings and oh yeah, I have to do this today and oh, I have to do this today and I do this today. And then I started to feel emotionally overwhelmed because I'm not actually doing it, right? All I'm seeing is like the gigantic mountain that I have to climb. And so then once I start to feel emotionally overwhelmed, mentally I'm not in a frame of mind to work. So what do I end up doing? How do I manage those emotions?

I move over to a different app. Let's open up Reddit. Let's look at what happened on a live stream fail. And so then what we do is we shift from our kind of like work-related legitimate reason to kind of an emotionally numbing, dopaminergic kind of thing. And then you're stuck in that cycle, and then I have to start the day by digging in, using willpower to overcome that and, like, drag myself to start working. And what I actually found is that when I avoid technology for the first 30 to 60 minutes of the day, you know, I kind of do my thing, I take a shower, I have a cup of tea, I'll read something, I'll chat, I'll go outside for a little bit.

Then when I sit down to work, I'm in a far better headspace. And my willpower battery is still fully charged. because I haven't had to overcome the addictive technology first thing in the morning. Habit number two is I started cutting back on caffeine or even cutting it out entirely. So I learned this lesson in a kind of bizarre way. So a couple of years ago, I got food poisoning. And when I got food poisoning, you know, like I couldn't eat anything. So I certainly wasn't having any caffeine.

And what I found is like three or four days after when I started to feel a little bit better, despite the fact that I had been sick, I was really surprised by how mentally alert I was in the afternoons and evenings. the more I kind of dug into it, I realized this is the effect of caffeine. And there are a couple of important things to understand about caffeine. The first is that caffeine doesn't actually give us energy. The neurobiological mechanism of caffeine is that it blocks adenosine receptors. And so adenosine, so we have the fundamental energy molecule in our cells is something called ATP. When we burn an ATP, we're sort of left with adenosine.

And the more adenosine we have, that's our brain signal that, okay, like we're tired. Like we burnt up a lot of energy. And when I go to sleep, I'm going to clear out all that adenosine. I'm going to remake ATP. And so the interesting thing about caffeine is that it doesn't give you energy. It numbs the tiredness signal. So this is really important because the more that you use caffeine, you're actually like building up more fatigue, more fatigue, more fatigue.

You're just numbing yourself to that signal. So it doesn't actually give you energy. All it does is create more fatigue down the road for a temporary boost right now. So let's try to understand what. happens when we use caffeine and why it's so hard to give up. It turns out that the way that our brain's reinforcement mechanisms are wired make it very easy to get addicted to caffeine. So there's a really simple principle when it comes to addictions. The more rapid the effect of the benefit, the more addictive it is. So the faster that the benefit hits, the more likely we are to be

addicted. So when we use caffeine, what happens is we get this burst of focus. And I've got a bunch of stuff to do today, so I can't afford to be sluggish. So I'm going to drink caffeine. And for a couple of hours, man, I can do anything. Like I'm grinding. I'm doing this task. I'm doing that task. I'm on. I'm streaming. I'm riding. Whatever it is. And then as time goes on and as the caffeine wears off, we get sluggish and sluggish and sluggish. And by the time that the evening rolls around, we're really tired. We really can't do anything. And the more that we feel like, oh my God, I can't do anything, the more dependent we become with caffeine. So if you look at like your productivity over the course of a day, let's say it's really stable. When you use caffeine,

what it basically does is shifts a period into high productivity, followed by a period of low productivity. So when I use caffeine, I feel that burst of energy. And I'm like, wow, caffeine is really amazing. And then I crash afterward. And so the more that my brain sort of learns, okay, like, I need caffeine, I need caffeine, I'm so productive with it, the more we start to use it. And then we kind of fall into the cycle that ends up actually like negatively impacting us. So in terms of how to cut back on caffeine, so I think the first thing is to recognize, once again, use understanding, right? So actually pay attention to your productivity over the course of a day and how you kind of feel. Another thing that you can do in terms of getting off of caffeine

is delaying when you start it. Okay, this is really important because a lot of times we're like zombies until we have caffeine. So I know it's kind of weird, but just wait half an hour, do other stuff, take a shower. Like you can still take a shower without caffeine. It's like not that hard. And then the last thing that's really, really important for coming off of caffeine, I know it's going to sound kind of like a no-brainer, but getting enough sleep. Caffeine is way harder to get rid of when you are not sufficiently rested. So when I get off of caffeine, now what I'll try to do is plan actually a nap during the day. So I recognize that I'm going to crash and I'm going to just lay down for a little while. Oftentimes I won't sleep. I'll just close my eyes,

but it really helps. And then you kind of acknowledge that for a three or four day period, like, it's going to be a little bit tricky. But a big part is getting a enough sleep at night. The next habit that I want to share with you all that I think is actually really, really has revolutionized my life and is so easy. Is pacing? So what I do now several times throughout the day is get up and walk back and forth. And I will demonstrate, for those of you who don't know what pacing is, this is what it looks like. I'll get out and I'll go like this. And people are like, what the hell? How does that help anything? I pace. He's revolutionized my life. How the hell does that help anyone? Great question. So let's understand why

we pace and what it replaces. So when I'm working, sometimes I get tired of work and I get distracted. And what do we do when we get tired of work and we get distracted? We usually do something with a technological device. So I'm fatigued, feel distracted. And then what I'm going to do is as I engage with something, let's say I open up like Reddit or Twitter or whatever, I get bombarded with information. So the first thing is that all of these activities are designed to increase engagement. right? So like when you watch one YouTube video, it's not like that's the only video. There's a bunch of suggestions. The suggestions on the right for the next video. There are cards at the end of the video that directing you to additional videos. One distraction becomes a second distraction, third distraction, fourth distraction, fifth distraction. So the price of opening up some kind of technological thing is like a five minute distraction becomes an hour long. The second thing is that when we engage in those kinds of things, it tends to ramp up our mind more. So as I open up Twitter and I see everything that is wrong with the world,

do you think that that helps me get back to work? And generally speaking, if you pay attention to the cycle, what happens is once you like log onto Twitter, we get so fatigued from our distraction that we eventually get bored of it and we go back to work. But when you're going back to work, you're kind of exhausted and like mentally eh. So how does pacing help? Pacing helps in two ways. The first is that it allows me to take a break from work

without slipping into something that's going to cost me an hour. The second thing that's really cool about pacing is that it actually decompresses my mental state. So when I engage with something, some inflammatory content on the internet, it activates my emotions and makes it like harder for me to focus. Whereas when I pace, like I just let my mind kind of wander. And like it kind of thinks through stuff. And I don't know how to describe it, but like basically like when you use the internet, you get ramped up, right? When you pace, like you kind of get like decompressed. You kind of chill out.

You're thinking about this stuff, thinking about that stuff. you kind of just like boop boop boop and eventually you can sit down and work again pacing is completely op you just get up step away from the computer get the blood flowing right so improve your venous return by walking back and forth use your muscles a little bit relieve some of that back pain from sitting and all that kind of good stuff so this kind of segues into the next thing that i really noticed which is the next habit that i built was giving myself time to think this is kind of interesting because I think one of the things that we've lost as humanity is time to think. So like 10,000 years ago, we had a lot of time to think.

Even if I'm a farmer working in a field, like I may be doing some kind of monotonous activity or if I'm milking a cow, I still have time to think. So I think one of the things that we've really like lost sight of is that the human brain evolved to have like this low kind of like mental activity processing kind of state. And now what happens is we get ramped up so much by everything going on so much stimuli. that we actually don't have time to like process any of that stuff. Why can it be hard to give yourself time to think? Because you're not being productive.

Oh my God. So I think if we kind of think a little bit about optimal productivity, we have to recognize that societally our brains don't have time to decompress anymore. And so now what we're sort of seeing is intensive decompression. People are going on meditation retreats. They're going to see therapists. They have to squeeze in all of their mental decompression into a highly efficient little bundle. And we see the value of.

this if you all have ever heard of shower thoughts. And look at what your mind is like in the shower. So many good thoughts, man. It feels so good. It's like invigorating. So give yourself time to think. It will transform your life. One thing that kind of came out when I started giving myself time to think, and this is the

last habit, arguably the most important, is I started turning some consumption into production. So increasingly, what we've become as humans is consumers. Books, audiobooks, YouTube videos, Twitter, social media, video games. So I've even heard of like, you know, people who will play games. Like I used to do this too. Like I would play wow. I would grind wow and listen to an audio book at the same time. So I could be productive while I'm playing wow. Makes sense, sort of. Right? Because if I have to grind this stupid crap, I might as well like listen to a good book, like listen to Stephen Hawking and learn something. So like what the hell is going on here?

So we've become consumers. We think that consumption is like laudable. Right. So if I read one book every day and I read 300 books a week, and I read this money, many books, and I listen to this podcast and do this and do this. Like, this is a badge of honor. And what I realized is I was just consuming, consuming, consuming. And that if I really want to be like, be successful, what I need to do is not consume. Like, sure, reading can be helpful. Don't get me wrong. What I mean is if I want to deliver value to the world, if I want to offer value as a human being, that doesn't come through consumption.

It comes through production. So I started creating stuff. So in my case, I did a lot of writing. Now, here's the problem with becoming a producer. So as you start producing, all kinds of problems arise. And the number one problem that arises from being a producer is wanting to make a product. We've associated writing with publishing. So, like, there's no point in writing unless you become an author.

There's no point in making music unless you're going to become an artist. So what we've started to do is we've tangled together the creative process with the creation. Once you tangle these two things together, it makes things so difficult. Because if my goal is to write a book, then the second I start writing, I get into problems with perfectionism. Is it good enough? Is it not good enough? Strategically, am I doing this? Do I need to find a publisher? Are people going to like it? Are they not going to like it? And then you get into writers block. You get paralyzed. It's not good enough. I need to prepare more. I need to go do this workshop. I need to learn more about this. Because the goal is to publish something. The goal is to be successful. The habit that I learned,

was just to become a producer instead of a consumer. To date, I've never published a book. Have I written books? 100%. Haven't published one. Don't care. But the key thing is to stop being a passive consumer. And to recognize that once you engage in that productive process,

you will like shed a lot of the problems that we face right now. You're just creating stuff. So shift from consumption to production. Why is that hard? Because we assume production with the finished product. We want to be successful. There's no point in writing a book that no one else. else will read. I completely disagree. I'm not saying that you stop consumption. I'd say somewhere

around 10 to 20 percent of your consumption time should be turned into production. So if you're like me and you think habits are important, but you struggle to actually implement them. Then I'd start with these five habits. Number one, avoid technology usage for the first 30 to 60 minutes of the day. Number two, cut back on your caffeine. It's a scam. Number three, pace. Literally, just walk back and four, easiest thing in the world to do. Leading from pacing is to give yourself time to think. And as you give yourself time to think, put that thought into the world in some way, start to become a producer instead of a consumer. So those are the five habits I'd recommend you all start with.