The One You Feed - How to Calm Your Mind and Be Productive with Chris Bailey

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

In this Episode, you'll learn: How we often feed the wrong wolf without even realizing it What some of the hidden sources of stress are in modern day society How many stressors have become so familiar, we don't even recognize the stress they cause How we can learn to bring more calm into our lives by practicing being present Why calming our minds leads to more productivity and less anxiety To learn more about Chris Bailey and his interesting work,  click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There is a lot of hidden stress that we choose to pay attention to simply because of the fact that stress becomes familiar. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort

to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor,

what's in the museum of failure, And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to really know really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The really know really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Chris Bailey, author and host of the Time and Attention

podcast, which explores the science of living a deeper, more intentional life. Along with having the best first name ever, Chris is also one of the self-proclaimed laziest people you will ever meet, famously knocking Eric and I into second and third place. This drive to free up time for relaxation has led Chris to intensively research and experiment with the subject of productivity for over the last decade. He's written hundreds of articles on the subject and has garnered coverage in media as diverse as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, GQ, Huffington Post, Harvard Business Review,

and others. Chris's books have also been published in 26 languages, and his newest book is How to Calm Your Mind, Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times. Hi, Chris. Welcome back. Hey, how have you been? I have been good. It's exciting to talk with you again. I knew you were on for a full interview, and I think you may have come on for like a short interview at one point. So this might be time three, but I've always enjoyed it, and I really enjoyed your latest book, which is called How to Calm Your Mind, Finding Presence in Productivity in Anxious Times. And I was saying

to you before we started, I got it and I was like, I don't, I just, I wasn't feeling enthused about it. I was like calm and presence. I mean, like that's kind of my bread and butter, you know, I'm just practicing Zen Buddhist. I just thought, all right, I'm going to read the same sort of stuff again. And I knew you meditated, but I was very pleasantly surprised by the book. And it went in directions that I absolutely didn't see. And I learned a lot from it. So really nice job. Well, thank you. That is nice to hear, because I found the same with a lot of the books on the topic. I've been a meditator for well over a decade at this point. I want to say two decades, but I don't think it's bad, probably a decade and a half or so. And so when I had this burnout,

this anxiety, these periods of burnout and anxiety I was going through, I was turning to a lot of the traditional advice out there. I was turning to the books, to the articles, to psychology today, to all these different places. How do I get over this? How do I get through this? And I found that what was out there wasn't really helping me. And I thought there was something kind of wrong with me. But that kind of led me to get curious about this research and look at the actual science instead of the wishful thinking on

topics like these. And I found a lot of lessons I didn't expect. So yeah, thank you. That means a lot. Yeah. And we'll get into what all that is in a moment, but we do need to start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandparent talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves that battle inside of us. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means

to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah. Well, what comes to the mind for the journey that I'm on right now is there are wolves that we feed without even realizing that we're feeding them. And for the journey that I embarked on that became this book, that is what comes to mind. I didn't realize the ways I was feeding my own anxiety, my own burnout, many of which were hidden from my view. And of course, we all have blind spots, right? And recognizing our blind spots is one of the reasons what makes podcasts like yours and others so fantastic. We can realize the areas we need to invest in that didn't even occur to us to invest in in the first place. And that, I think, was the case for me. That's

what comes to mind right now. Yeah, there's a couple things that came to mind for me when you were talking about this, and I was thinking about your book and the parable. You know, the other is you talk very much about how calm is the polar opposite of anxiety. And so we are very often by the actions we're taking feeding one or the other of those things. And by nature of our modern world, most of us are feeding the anxiety. And to your point, we may not know it. And we're going to get into what a lot of those hidden things are or things that we may vaguely know aren't good for us, but not really be able to put a finger on why. Yeah.

That kind of came to mind, that calm versus anxiety. But let's start just a little bit, because I'd love to talk about why this book for you. Yeah. It's funny, that story. I love that parable. And the calm versus anxiety, this is one of the misconceptions I had going into this journey, because I was anxious, burnt out, and I didn't really understand what those things were. But what I found looking at the research on this subject of calm, first of all, there isn't a lot of it. There is a scant amount of research that does exist on calm that we can draw from. And I define calm as a subjectively positive state with a low level of mental arousal with an accompanying absence of anxiety.

And if you look at the research that does exist, though, I love how you started with that spectrum idea. We think anxiety is a spectrum that goes from not anxious to super anxious, can't really function. But the latest research shows that anxiety is more of a spectrum that ranges from high anxiety on one end to high calmness on the other end. And so the more we invest in overcoming this level of anxiety in our lives, the more calm we can find. We can go past the point of no anxiety towards the point of calm and feel even better and have more of a capacity to absorb stress that comes our way. And, you know, you asked about the why for the book. This all came to the head for me when I was on stage in front of a group of 100 people. I was giving a presentation on productivity on some of the work I'd put out in the past. And I noticed in the moment, this sinking feeling coming over me.

And in the moment, I just remember thinking, oh, what is happening right now? I can't remember what I was supposed to say. I feel like I have a couple of dozen marbles in my mouth that are dancing around my tongue. And I realized in the moment, like, I was having an anxiety attack. You know, shortly after that decreased cognitive function, I felt as if somebody had shot my brain full with a vial of liquid adrenaline. You know, I felt as if I was instantly in that fight or flight mode. I almost left the stage. But luckily, I stayed and had rehearsed that talk many, many times over and powered through

it to a lukewarm reception. But I remember after that point, just lying down in the hotel room that I was staying at that was attached to the conference center, just kind of reliving it while thinking that something needed to really, really change. I wasn't sure why. I had felt exhausted. I had felt a bit cynical, a bit unproductive even. I felt a bit burnt out, anxious. I had tried a lot up to that point. But it was at that point in time when I thought, I am getting to the bottom of this. I don't care what it takes. I don't care if I have to clear out the next several months. I don't care. I am getting to the bottom of this for my own mental health. And that was the impetus for what became this book, you know, realizing that

the stuff I had explored up to that point was not working. I needed to find something that fixed it. I didn't intend to write this book. I really, really didn't. But at the end, I thought, okay, this is stuff that isn't really out there. It's my own weird approach as somebody who thinks a lot about productivity and presence and just bringing my full self to whatever it is that I'm doing. Let's get this out there. But it was an interesting journey that started off on a note of discomfort that led me from that anxious part of the calm spectrum towards the calm side, fortunately. Hello from the calm side. Yeah. And one of the things that you said, and you said that it mystified you, and it sort of mystified me too early on in the book, is that you were doing so many of the things that we recommend that we do in life in order to be calm or at peace. You were meditating 30 minutes a day,

you were getting massages, you were exercising. You were taking generally pretty good care of yourself. If I were to look at a list of like things that are commonly recommended to help us be less anxious or more calm, you kind of had checked off the top five on that list and were doing them pretty well. And yet you were still dealing with high anxiety and burnout. And kind of what I took from that and then reading the rest of the book was that that self-care stuff is important and it's valuable. However, there's really something about the way we are orienting our minds and our time. It's almost as if we're doing all these good things for us self-care wise, but then we're doing all these other things, habit of mind wisewise that are fighting against

each other, and the self-care stuff is just sort of getting overwhelmed. Yeah, it's kind of a band-aid on top of something that is structurally broken, where, for example, this wasn't my case, but if you have the most stressful job in the world, and you wake up, and you go to work, and you come home, and you have like two hours to spare, and you just spend like all that time doing yoga and meditating, in the morning, you still have to go to this job that you hate. That is the biggest source of stress in the world. And that's not, you know, work is definitely one aspect of it, but there are deep-seated causes of modern-day anxiety that we didn't always have. You know, one example of this is stress that comes to mind, where we have a lot of stress in our lives. That's so obvious, I don't even need to say it. But the more I uncovered the stress in my life, the more I

realized that there is actually a lot of stress that is hidden from our view in our own lives. You know, a lot of stress we don't have control over. There's financial concerns, economic concerns. There's the stress of raising a family. There's the stress of just going to work and having a very big workload every day and, you know, dreading that feeling on Sunday. There's a lot of stress we don't have control over. But there is a lot of hidden stress that we choose to pay attention to simply because of the fact that stress becomes familiar. The news is a really good example of this for me, where I was investing a lot of these self-care strategies while I was checking the news every five or 10 minutes. And this led to a lot of interesting

research. You know, there's one study that was conducted around the Boston Marathon bombings. And what the team of researchers did is they looked at two groups of people. The first group of people watched six or more hours of news coverage about the Boston Marathon bombings. The second group of people were runners in the actual marathon. And what they found was that the people who watched the news coverage, we don't have control over. And constantly exposing our mind to threatening scenarios and situations, that causes anxiety. Because of course we're giving our mind raw material to be anxious about. Chronic stress is, research shows, the singular cause of burnout. Burnout is

caused by that one thing and one thing only, right? Burnout, which is not exhaustion, by the way. Burnout is exhaustion combined with cynicism and feeling unproductive, right? We need all three to be fully burnt out. But it doesn't really stop there, right? There's this modern day picture to untangle, another ingredient of which is dopamine. It's a neurotransmitter we have all heard of. You know, you could probably take a shot every time somebody mentions dopamine on the podcast. I've never created the one you feed drinking game. Oh, do you have a bingo card, at least? We should, because I don't drink, I'm sober. But we should have a One You Feed bingo card.

You want to know what the number one would be? Actually, listeners wouldn't get it because I almost try to never talk about it again. But the number one thing in every book about psychology, spirituality, any of that anymore is neuroplasticity. Oh. As if that is some new concept that we need to keep rehashing. I mean, I just, every single book, I'm like, all right, I'm flipping the next three pages. I don't need to read these same studies about how, you know, scientists used to believe

that we couldn't change our brains, but now, fascinating news flash. Anyway. It's like a text expander snippet in every author's dictionary. You know, you may have been the person who got me to start using text expander. Oh. It's possible. And oh my God. Oh. Oh my God. It's game changing.

So good. The one I might use the most often is I type in Mihaly C and it expands to the full name of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Yes. And, oh, I actually used that one twice today. The flow researcher guy. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The fact that you can say his name is impressive.

I think my most common one is the one you feed. I mean, how many times in the last eight years have I had to type that? And now I just like, you know, semicolon T-O-YY-F, done. Oh yeah, I love TextExpander. Where does dopamine rank on this list of most commonly mentioned topics, would you say? It's surging. It's definitely having its moment. It's coming way up. such a misunderstood neurotransmitter too. In looking at the research on dopamine, it was amazing to discover just how little we understand about dopamine. Of course, there's a lot of experts, quote unquote experts, who will pretend to understand dopamine through and through, but the forefront of the research doesn't even understand it. And we paint dopamine out to be

a bad thing. But first of all, it's an a bad thing. But first of all, it's an incredibly complex thing. But second of all, it's not entirely a bad thing. We use dopamine to think logically and critically. You know, if you're hunkering down on writing a book and using every corner of your mind, you're going to be using dopamine. That is going to be a dopamine-fueled activity, along with other neurotransmitters, of course. But what we find with the modern situation that we're in is that there's certain activities that we can engage in that predominantly release dopamine. One good example of these are super stimuli, which is the name scientists use for a stimulus, an object of attention, something we can pay attention to that

just surges, there you go, surge in dopamine in our brain, that is kind of a highly processed version of something we're wired to enjoy. And so we love making love and internet porn, just surges dopamine in our brain in a way that physical presence with another human being doesn't. Takeout food, which is a favorite escape of my own. Some nice butter chicken or a lovely burrito bowl. Brown rice sushi, I'm a big fan of. Great options here in Ottawa, which might just arrive at our doorstep at 6 p.m. this evening, because I'm getting inspiration in this current present moment. That is for a super stimuli, because it's a highly processed version. But it's dopamine, it's the chronic stress, but it's also a constant craving

for more, which was another fascinating topic to untangle, where we have this natural tendency to strive for more of whatever we have at all costs, more accomplishment, more fame, more everything, which makes us less present and less engaged. So I feel I've gone forever with this answer, but it's this fascinating constellation of topics where there is no singular cause of modern day anxiety, you know, this non-clinical anxiety and burnout, honestly, that so many of us are going through right now. But it's entirely possible to make sense of the picture that is causing this situation and untangle it a little bit. Yeah, there's a couple things in there that I want to hit on and draw out. The first was, I loved the part that you referenced about what constitutes burnout, right?

Those three factors, right? Exhaustion, cynicism, lack of productivity, right? All three of those things kind of need to be there. And I think that's a very helpful lens. And then the second is I do think you did a really nice job of sort of boiling the main causes of modern anxiety, at least the ones that we can control down to really these two key ideas. One is the mindset of more. And then the other is this sort of super stimuli that we're always exposing ourselves to. So let's maybe start with the mindset of more a little bit, and then we'll move into super stimuli. So tell me a little bit about what the mindset of more means to you. we have, often at any cost, right? And we often want things that conflict with one another in

the moment. We want more food, but we also want more fitness. We want more likes on Instagram, but we also want more time for living the actual life that we're posting about. So we are always striving for more. And we strive for more because so much of what we do, it's very much a dopaminergic, it's based on dopamine mindset that we have. Some scientists call dopamine the molecule of more because it is what propels us to drive for more. And this moves to our pursuit of accomplishment as well, where when we strive to accomplish more, you know, we're kind of fueling that mindset. But here's the fascinating thing. The networks in our brain that support us in acquiring more, our acquisition networks, are anti-correlated with our brain networks that support us when we're present

and engaged and with whatever it is and whom ever it is that we're with. And so, the more we strive for more, the less present we become with our lives because of this dichotomy, this striving versus savoring. And this was a fascinating, fascinating topic to explore, is there is an actual science to savoring our lives. Savoring is the name for the process where we convert positive experiences, enjoyable experiences, into enjoyable emotions. And so, we all have positive things that we encounter every single day. I am casually sipping on this cup of tea for folks watching the video that I'm drinking out of my CBC mug, very colorful mug, great merch for the CBC, in fact. And I'm savoring the sips of

this tea. But I could just as easily been enjoying this tea and not really savoring it. You know, just kind of mindlessly taking a sip of a cup of tea or a cup of coffee or eating a delicious meal and just scarfing it down and not really noticing it or enjoying it. And so, savoring really is this process of converting those positive experiences into positive emotions. And it's fair, there's different types of savoring too. There's luxuriating, there's thanksgiving, there's marveling that we can practice. But here's the fascinating thing. The more we strive for more, the less likely we are to savor our lives. The wealthier we are, the less likely we are to savor our lives. Men have a more challenging time of savoring their lives than women do.

If you put somebody in this acquisition mentality in a study, they are far more likely to enjoy pieces of chocolate, for example. And so this dichotomy where we're always seeking more is something that kind of unbalances our mind from calm, because the networks that support us in being present are the networks that support us in being calm. And so, striving for more is anti-correlated with that. Yeah, the savoring is very interesting, and it's one of those things that I've been thinking more about lately. And there was something that you said in the book that I thought was really

useful, which was that savoring is a skill that grows with practice, right? And furthermore, you say the lower our stimulation height, the easier savoring everyday life becomes. We've not gotten to stimulation height, but basically what that means is the calmer our life is, the easier it is to savor. I know this experientially, right? I know that the more I practice being present and really taking in what's around me, the better I get at it. And the more keyed up I am, the harder it is for me to do that. It's almost like on Thursday night when I'm trying to wrap up my work week and I am just moving 100 miles an hour, almost impossible. By the time it's Saturday night and I'm about to go back to work,

but I've taken two days off, I'm actually better, even in that little bit of time, a little bit better able to savor the things in my life. And we'll get to why that is about these levels of dopamine, but savoring is a really powerful thing. And that mindset of more is so pernicious. Where do you see it come up? Oh, geez. Everywhere. Besides everywhere. Yeah. Specifically. I was a homeless heroin addict at 24. So clearly I'm familiar with the phenomenon. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I mean, dopamine ruled my life, right? The craving ruled my life, but I have always seen it in primarily professional and financial terms. I know that I have to really pause and appreciate where we are. So for example,

we'll likely in 2023 hit a number of downloads per month that we used to do in say a year. That's awesome. Yeah. It's going to be great. Yeah. So I was sharing this with my partner. And so I gave that really interesting and great information. And then immediately I said, but they're not exactly Tim Ferriss numbers. Yeah. Right. And so I really have to watch for that. It's always like, well, that's good. But to your point, there could be more. And it's like, we all know this phenomenon. I'll be happy when, and we get when, and then we just roll right on.

Yeah. And so for me, it's really been a matter of trying to stop and appreciate where I'm actually at and recognize that the me of a year ago would be thrilled to be where I'm sitting today. Yeah. But the me of today is not. The me of today is like, well, I need more. And so this has always been a big thing in my life. It's part of the reason that I hate TV commercials.

But I don't just hate them because they're annoying. I hate them because if I'm not careful, they work on me, right? They may not make me want the thing that they're advertising. So if I see a beer commercial, I may not want beer, but I certainly want the body of the guy on the beach hanging out with the girl with the sun. I mean, so the life they portray, I find myself suddenly going, that's what I want. That's what I want. It's why I stay far away from Instagram, broadly speaking. I just don't think it's good for me because I feel like for whatever reason, I am susceptible to the mindset of more. And I've had to spend a lot of energy on really trying to actively counter it. And that's definitely a work in progress. And Instagram is something I write in the book because it's designed to take advantage of this craving for more. When Frances Hogan, the Facebook whistleblower, testified in front of Congress, she basically boiled the Instagram algorithm down into two things, bodies and comparing lifestyles.

Yeah. into two things, bodies and comparing lifestyles. That's Instagram, right? That's the Instagram explore tab. Those are the reels that rise to the surface because those produce the most dopamine in our mind and keep us coming back for more. Dopamine doesn't provide us with pleasure, but it leads us to feel as if we're about to experience pleasure. And this feeling that we have never quite arrived, so we have to keep going, is what propels social media like that forward. And we, at the same time, the mindset of more manifests as currencies that we wish to accumulate in these different applications. Likes, followers, retweets, responses from

famous verified people, you know, all these different triggers and cues. It's really quite fascinating how these apps take advantage of our psychology, but bodies and comparing lifestyles. Hey everyone, this is Jenny. One of my absolute favorite things is when we hear from listeners of the show. And something we hear quite often is that one of the biggest obstacles to feeding the good wolf is remembering. Because life is busy and we get caught up in routines and we're all on autopilot so much of the time. So to help with that, we've started sending a couple of text messages after each episode is released to listeners who sign up for them. And it's something we're offering for free.

A listener wrote us and said, The messages cause me to pause, even if just for a moment, and help me to remember important bits of wisdom, bringing them to the forefront of my mind. Remembering is the hardest part, and the text messages are super helpful. So if you'd like to hear from us a few times a week via text, go to oneufeed.net slash text and sign up for free. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Oh, Yeah, really. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500,

a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I was really struck by that idea you just mentioned of currencies, how all these social platforms have these different currencies and how we are sort of wired up to respond to currency. So money is one, but now we've got all these other currencies that we are shooting for. I found that part to be really interesting because I hadn't thought of it in quite that way. Yeah. And if you ever want to see a great example of digital currencies, of applications taking advantage of digital currencies,

download a video game that is designed for a kid like Subway Surfers. If you download Subway Surfers, there are three or four different currencies that you can spend in the game. There's event tokens, there's coins, there's different keys, there's so many different kinds of currencies that you have to manage and accumulate. It's like some like foreign exchange app almost, except you can't convert them with one another. It's really quite fascinating. And then pay attention to how hooked you become to a game so simple. Yeah. Yeah. Anything else on the mindset of more that you feel like would be useful to talk about? I think the key there, and again, I'm going to harp on this topic

that is one of the squares on the bingo card, but it really is dopamine. Dopamine is why we keep coming back for more. And the brain networks is what I would kind of reiterate there. The thing to kind of internalize is that the networks that support our craving more are anti-correlated with the ones that make us present and calm. You say in the book, ceaseless ambition compromises calm, right? Like if we are just always after the next thing, it's hard to be calm. So let's now sort of change directions just a little bit because you are a productivity writer. You have been a writer about let's get more done. And so talk about how your previous work with productivity ties into this work on calm, specifically when we think about this mindset of more?

Yeah. I think our striving for more productivity needs boundaries. Because if it doesn't have a container that it can live inside of, it's going to bleed out into pretty much every element of our life, right? And wanting to accomplish more is not a bad thing. I am not anti-accomplishment. You know, we should have goals and we should strive to achieve those goals because goals that are connected to some tangible outcome and difference that aren't based on a metric, that aren't based on something that is a nice round number, that makes a tangible difference in our lives and the lives of other people. That's what work is all about, right? Our work should make a difference. Our lives

should make a difference, right? That is what makes it meaningful. But when we don't rein in that pursuit of accomplishment, or at least give it boundaries, we focus all of our time on acquisition, and we become miserable people, right? In fact, you know, going back to that savoring idea, one of my favorite things to ask somebody who is very successful, and I usually only mention this to very successful people, or at least people who would be considered successful by traditional measures, is what in life do you enjoy the most? And it stumps most of them. They can't think of something that they enjoy because they're too busy trying to acquire more. And one of my favorite strategies for combating this are

just defining productivity hours. So what these are, are boundaries around our pursuit of accomplishment. And this kind of has a bunch of effects at the same time. So at the start of the day, I might say, I want seven productivity hours today for work. Or I might define the hours such that I'm going to be productive from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. today with my work. And what this does is this compartmentalizes that pursuit for more accomplishment. It kind of has the same effect as a deadline in a way, where if I said to you, Eric, you won this all expenses paid trip to Australia, but it leaves on Sunday, you would probably find a way to get next week's work done this week so that you could enjoy and savor that trip. Productivity hours kind of have the same benefit

where we get to compartmentalize this striving for more into those hours, has the deadline effect. There's always an end in sight. So even if we have one or two spare hours in the evening, we can enjoy them. We can unwind. We can step back from what we're doing. And we can find that daily balance with striving and savoring. But yeah, it's reigning in that pursuit of accomplishment. But there are great productivity benefits to calm as well. This is something I was surprised to find. So I study productivity, and I realized after going through this period of burnout, just how shot my productivity was. And it's not a surprise, right? When we're burnt out, we're unproductive. That is one of the core

attributes of being burnt out. We're exhausted. Good luck trying to get work done if you're exhausted. And we're cynical. And so when we're cynical, we actually look out for fewer opportunities in our environment. Happier people, people who are in a positive mental state are 31% more productive than people who are in a negative or neutral state, as studied by Sean Acor out of Harvard. And so burnout is not good for our productivity, but calm, as we move from that anxious side of the calm spectrum to the calmness side of the spectrum, is wonderful for our productivity. A good example is, you know, say you have to give a big speech in front of a group of a thousand people, and I gave you some report to read and then make a few notes on. You would probably find it difficult to make notes on that report in that moment. Or maybe you're reading a research paper and you're on an airplane and you hit a pocket of heavy turbulence. Good luck processing and internalizing that

research paper. You're probably going to have to go back, or maybe you're watching a movie even, and you might have to go back for that too. Anxiety has the same effect as this, but only in a more minor fashion and all day long, right? If we're working with an anxious mind, it actually shrinks our working memory capacity by an average of around 17%. And so what this does is our working memory allows us to process whatever it is that we're doing in the moment. And this allows us less mental capacity to think, to connect information, to recall information. Anxiety limits our cognitive performance in general. It makes us more distractible. It leads our self-talk to go through the roof, which makes us more likely to procrastinate. It leads us to less engagement and

less presence with whatever it is that we're doing. And in the book, I calculate out how about eight hours of work takes us around 10 hours to do when we're working with a mildly anxious mind. And so if over these last few years, you've noticed that you need to work longer hours or that, you know, you seem to have more, way more meetings than usual, or you just don't have enough time anymore, even though not much has changed. Anxiety could be why. And so there is this fascinating, fascinating connection with productivity and calm. That because calm leads us to presence, it makes us more productive.

Because presence is ultimately what productivity is all about. It's about being engaged with whatever it is that we're doing in the moment. If we can always be engaged with whatever it is we intend to do, we never need productivity advice because we can always just do the things that we set out to do in the first place. But there is this flip side as well where the pursuit of productivity, where the pursuit of productivity, when it is driven by a generalized mindset to acquire more, can harm our pursuit of calm. And so it is this double-edged sword where when we don't reign in that pursuit, we can become less calm. But when we compartmentalize our pursuit of productivity in something like productivity hours, that's the example I give in the book, by managing the chronic stress that

leads to burnout, we can have our cake and eat it too, provided we maintain that delicate dance. Yep. I love that idea of boundaries, and I found them to be very helpful in my own life. I had been on a sort of relentless striving path for a long time. And my career had been in software startup companies, which are a place that by their very nature are frenetically trying to do more and do more with less, right? It's a supercharged ambition environment. And then from there, I had spent five years building my own solar energy company. And then I had spent four years doing this podcast while I worked in pretty high level jobs in the software field. And then I was really focused on how do I get out of that to do this full time? Yeah. So there was a period of time, I don't know how long ago, it's probably been three years now, maybe, I don't know, two years where this sounds silly, but I finally went like weekends are off. Yeah. I'm going to take two days a week and I'm not going to work because up till then I'd be like, well, I'll get a little bit done or I'll take a coaching call or, but I never

got all the way off. And it was hard at first, but once I really got it, then all of a sudden there was a point where it flipped and I became fiercely protective of that time. Yeah. My partner, Jenny and I work together. And so it's like one of my days off and she starts bringing up something about work. I'll very often be like, nope, not today. Not right now. I can't do it because I won't, I know my brain well enough to know if I engage with that question, it could just, you know, lead me down the rabbit hole. If I engage with that question, it could just, you know, lead me down the rabbit hole. Although I do find, I think we all struggle with this. The hardest thing for me to turn off, and I do it better at certain points than others,

is I sort of beat it out of my life and then it comes back is email. Yeah. You know, so my brain will say, well, just check the email. It's, you know, it's your day off, but, you know, just hop in there real quick. Partially because it's just habitual at this point. But that's one. And then the other thing that I noticed was I was fortunate enough in June to take a month off, which I couldn't believe I could do and was incredible. And I totally switched off.

And I did all the things that you recommend sort of in the book, you know, like work was gone. I wasn't doing it. I wasn't checking email. I wasn't checking email. I wasn't on screens at all. You know, I was incredibly happy. I love it. So mindset of more, we know to be problematic and it ties into dopamine also.

Dopamine being the molecule of more. We've touched on them a little bit, but let's get specific about what we mean by super stimuli and what they're doing in our lives. What are some of the things that they are and why are they so problematic for us? Yeah. So we find it very difficult to resist super stimuli in the moment because they're more amusing to our mind. Porn is a far more amusing thing than answering email or doing whatever it is, I don't know, whatever else he could be doing in the moment. I'm giving the editor, Chris, that cannot be the opening quote, by the way. You cannot use that one. But that was the understatement of the decade. Let's see, what else was on my

morning schedule this morning? No, I'm just kidding. I've actually stopped watching porn. I used to be a user of porn, and I don't know if I'll go back. It's addictive because of how much dopamine it releases in our brain. Social media is a far more dopamine-inducing activity than talking to a friend on the phone. It's far more novel, right? Anything that is novel releases dopamine in our brain, right? It's novelty, it's genetics, it's direct effect. Those are the three dopamine factors. Genetics vary depending on the person. Direct effect is just how much something directly influences your life. If you find $1,000 on the street, walk and buy it, it's going to release more dopamine than if you found a $5 bill.

But novelty seems to be the thing that varies the most, especially digitally, especially with the super stimuli that we tend to. Social media, email even, even though it's less dopaminergic, it's often quite a bit more stimulating than the things that we actually wish to accomplish. Examples like these abound. Video games are highly dopaminergic. They release far more dopamine than playing a physical board game, for an example, with a few loved ones, even though that leads to presence. And I love what you said off the top, where we aren't really drawn to calm. We don't really find calm to be a sexy thing. And it's because it isn't, right? Calm is the capacity for excitement. Calm is the foundation for excitement, right? It is not excitement in

and of itself, but it leads us to have a capacity for focus, for presence, for productivity. And super stimuli do get in the way of that because the brain networks are anticorrelated for dopamine and for calm. And so the more we invest in the infrastructure in our brain, this goes back to the whole idea, I don't know if you've heard of this, called neuroplasticity. Have you heard of this, Eric? I'm just kidding. I don't even think that word shows up in the book because it's...

I don't know that it does. No, I don't think so. Congratulations. Well, you finished it, so it must not have. Congratulations. But the networks for acquisition and for stimulation, right? They're dopamine-driven networks that when they're activated, the calm network and the present network, the here and now network isn't, and vice versa. When the here and now network is active, we're not going to be striving for more, and we're not going to strive for dopamine-fueled stimulation in that moment.

But because of this, you know, usually what releases this dopamine doesn't lead to lasting satisfaction. The satisfaction is fleeting, and it's always in the form of a shallow type of anticipation where when we're using our phone we're always feeling as if something good will soon happen and it never quite does yes whether we're trying to acquire something we're feeling like we're getting something done but we're not necessarily sure what. And that's what super stimuli creates. They're this fascinating phenomenon that are incredibly challenging to resist in the moment because of how our ancient brain loves them and rewards us for engaging with them.

and rewards us for engaging with them. But at the same time, they lead to an emptiness that we can't quite articulate. And what that emptiness often is, and how it manifests chemically, is in the form of an absence of other neurochemicals that make us feel present, that make us feel present and proud and satisfied and happy and like we have a good rush to accomplish something and connected with other people, right? These are oxytocin, endorphins, serotonin, even endocannabinoids that are released by going for something like a run. We don't experience these in the volumes that make us feel good because we're over-invested in that dopamine that leads to less presence over time and ultimately less productivity. We do use dopamine for logical work that allows us to make good progress. But when becoming present is the thing that allows us to make the most progress, more so than almost any other factor in our lives, that's something we can't ignore if we care about accomplishment that, again,

has boundaries, isn't just unabashed ambition you know, ambition, but we need presence now more than anything. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called really know really. And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The issue is not dopamine, right? Like in anything in life, when the balance gets way out of whack, it's problematic, right? And so our lifestyle, this combination of the constant pursuit of more, the culture that tells us we should be pursuing

more, and then these super stimuli that keep our dopamine levels really high, all that gets us to be where that's where most of our attention is. And you make a really good point that I think is an important one, which is that when we are sort of riding this dopamine fueled life, which is social media and, you know, wanting more and these super stimuli when we're when we're riding that sort of life, if we step off that train for a minute, it doesn't feel good. No. Right? It doesn't feel good. If we step into something that's lower dopamine, that's more oxytocin, A, we may not even get those chemicals because they're not going to show up right away, but it doesn't feel good.

No. And this is the addict's dilemma, right? This is the addict's dilemma. And I know it well, and I've talked to so many people, which is, let's say you're an alcoholic, it doesn't matter. And you stop. Some people feel better better right away but most people do not yeah right what they feel is much worse they actually feel lousy because their brain has come to depend upon and operate in a certain way and things that would bring pleasure don't because the neurochemicals are all out of whack yeah and so there's this process of having to say okay let me let me stay with this

long enough that i can sort of come down to a level where these things that we talk about being more nourishing you know spending time with our families, taking walks in nature, playing a board game, where those things of plot every activity you do over the course of the day in a chart where the higher it is on this chart, the more dopamine it produces in your mind when you do it. And so like you were saying, drug use would be at the very top of this. Alcohol, common, very common drugs that so many of us engage with would be near the top that pulls us into a higher height of stimulation. Then you start to work downwards, right? Maybe you get to porn. Then below that, of course, is email as we've already established. And then maybe somewhere floating in the middle are the projects, maybe a DIY project. Actually, that would probably be a bit lower, but you start working lower and lower and lower. At the bottom, you have things like

bookkeeping and meditation, where these things pull you down into a lower level of stimulation. But if you look at what allows for that presence, for that calm satisfaction, that enjoyment in what you're doing, those activities aren't in the upper bound of this chart. You know, the words that I would use to describe a lot of the activities in the very top of this imaginary chart would be words like shallow and empty and hit, you know, a hit of these activities. Instagram might be up there. TikTok would definitely be up there too. But the activities that are near the bottom, right? It's the quiet campfire watching, you know, if you're going camping and you're watching the flames dance and you're just mesmerized by the campfire flames, that exists near the bottom. It's the comfortable silence

in a conversation with somebody you're good friends with. It's a deep meditation session. It's a board game night with friends, right? These activities are what make life meaningful, right? We don't get meaning from the activities near the top. And a big part of that is they don't release a balanced concoction of these neurotransmitters that we were chatting about that make us feel confident and proud and in the tracks and present and engaged and happy. And it's entirely possible to come down, but it is kind of, we have to step downward. If you spent the entire day on social media and then you just lied on the couch for 10 minutes, your brain would be restless as hell, you know, because you would still be flying at this high altitude and there is a natural kind of updraft in how high we go. Yep. And we'll put a image of your, what do you call it? Your dopamine stimulation chart? Or what's the actual term for this thing?

I think I call it in the book, altitudes of stimulation. Yeah. A stimulation height chart. So we will put that in the book. And if I am ambitious enough, I will put mine out there also in the show notes. Oh, good, good. Of all the things in the book, this was one of the things that most sort of flipped on the light switch for me. Because when I looked at your chart and I imagined my own chart, it was easy to see that so many of the things that we say we want to do more of are down near the bottom of this chart. And the things that we say we want to do less of are up near the top of this chart, just almost across the board. And I've coached hundreds and hundreds of people and all their

charts would look exactly the same. Some variation on down near the bottom of the chart are things like playing piano, playing guitar, cooking, spending time with family, doing any sort of creative projects. And up at the top are things like alcohol and Instagram and processed food and all these things. And it's just so interesting to think of the correlation between all these things is this sort of dopamine thing. And that the basic idea is that the more you stimulate dopamine, the more you want more of that thing, even if those things aren't exactly the same. Yeah. Right. I think it shows really well how a lifestyle of, you know, Instagram, of, you know, Instagram, YouTube, drinking alcohol, online shopping, how that feeds more of those same things, whereas a life that has more writing, you know, playing guitar, meditating,

you know, cooking, talking with family, that those things also cause more. But it's this constant pull upwards. And you say that in the book, that given our modern world, we are always going to be pulled up that chart. And I mean, I know for me that so much of what I am working on in life is trying to stay in the bottom part of that chart. Yeah, it's so true. And I think so much of this is modifying the environment around us so that we can create the external conditions to actually stay there. My favorite way of doing this is what I've come to call a stimulation fast. And, you know, dopamine fasting is quite a popular phenomenon, but you can't fast from dopamine any more than you can just fast for the rest of your

life or something from carbohydrates, right? You need carbohydrates in the chemical sense of the term in order to continue living your life. What you don't need as far as dopamine goes are those empty hits of dopamine. I like how you put it, the things you really actually want to be doing less of. And so a stimulation fast, I thought it was actually the most gimmicky thing when I did the first one, because I thought, well, anything with the word fast in it immediately sets off alarm bells if it doesn't have the word intermittent before it. But for this kind of fast, like I thought, what's this going to do? Like, this is kind of gimmicky.

I don't know. I guess I'll do it. Like, it'll be something interesting to enjoy. The social medias of your day, the email app on your phone, the different things that just stimulate your mind, most of which come from the digital world. Because that's another thing I found is anxiety is often found in the digital world. Calm is found in the analog. It's found in nature. It's found with people. It's found on the meditation cushion, which, you know, it's funny. Meditation, I think, is only like two or three pages of this book, I'm pretty sure, like you were saying. So find activities that you can sub in for these

dopamine-fueled activities. Because there will be a hole in your life where these activities used to be. If you pick up your phone first thing from your nightstand, put a book there so you can pick that up instead. If you have, you know, this time between meetings or something, let your mind wander deliberately and just have a notepad to capture whatever comes up. Find substitutes for the activities and go without them for a month. Definitely consult with somebody who can guide you through harsher comedowns, especially with drug use and around those sorts of situations. But with technology use, that's a safer comedown.

And the first week will be hell. It was for me. But I found that after about a week, the word that comes to mind is expanse, you know, where I felt I had entered a situation where there was an expanse of opportunities for me to engage with different things that I hadn't engaged with in a long time. You know, I was looking around and I kind of saw my life differently because the things that I used to do just for fun that were far less engaging and produced less dopamine than, going on Instagram, for an example. You know, playing the piano was suddenly an option because I couldn't do anything super stimulating with that time. So I would play the piano. I would do a bit of

painting. I would go for a walk through the trees near where we live here. I would bug my wife to play a board game, you know, a game of cribbage. And looking around, you know, I realized in the dopamine fast that what changed was the fact that I was at a lower stimulation level. When I looked around before, you know, I would see the objects of attention that were at the higher level. You know, the Instagrams of the world, the internet porn of the world, those sorts of things. But at the lower level, I found enjoyment.

I found this genuine connection with whatever I was doing. And the first week was hell. But after that, I felt like this expanse opened up and so did the options for what I could do and even working. Instead of checking email and getting to inbox zero one more time, I would limit myself to five or six checks throughout the course of the day. And between those checks, I would just look around and, oh, there's a bunch of receipts that I haven't filed on my desk. I'm going to file those. And I looked around my desk.

My office was clean. Life had an order. And it's not about pushing ourselves to come down. We deserve to be at a lower stimulation height. We're too good for the internet most of the time. And our free time is more valuable than that. Yeah, I love the way you just said that. We are better than this.

And none of this in your book, even though it may sound like it here, is a rail against the uses of digital technology or that all these things are all bad it's a relationship to and a moderation of where possible yeah we tend to be pretty out of whack with these things like i've managed to wrestle twitter into a little box. And I broadly speaking, it gets 10, 15 minutes a day of my time. And I'm like, that's fine. Like it actually seems fine for that. And I think with almost all these things, I've noticed I can find a point if you're really monitoring your interior state, there's a point where it crosses over. I can feel it now where it crosses over for it being like this was useful this was interesting into now i'm scrolling for more yeah now i'm hooked into

the thing in a different way and it feels different you know you made me think of a quote that i've heard a couple times lately and i really really love it. It is that it's hard to get enough of something that almost works. And that's the problem with all these things is they almost make us happy or they very temporarily do. But since we're fooled, we keep going back for more, but you can't get enough of something that doesn't really satisfy. And so, yeah, I just really have found your framing of all this really opened up something for me or clarified for me ideas that I didn't quite see the overarching themes in the same way. That's a great quote. I love that. And I love the digital world. I'm a big tech nerd. I love that. Yeah. And I love the digital world. You know, I'm a big tech nerd. I love

following the industry. I love collecting gadgets. I love all that stuff. But I think ultimately, you know, where my thinking settled in this journey is technology exists to make our lives more efficient, where the analog exists so that things can become more meaningful, right? So if we want an experience to be meaningful, we do it the analog way. That's a conversation, that's a board game night, that's a letter we're writing to somebody. But if something needs to be efficient, it's best to do it digitally, you know, whether that's texting somebody, writing an email, calling an Uber, ordering some whole grain sushi, whatever it might be.

We've moved up from butter chicken. Yeah. Before we know, we're going to be having a nice filet mignon tonight. No, I don't know. It's probably going to be sushi. We can extract utility out of the digital world without succumbing to it, I think. Yeah. And that idea of digital being good for efficiency and analog being better for meaningfulness has just had me rethink how I use texting in that there are certain cases where texting is absolutely the thing that I want, that I need. It's the right thing to do. But since reading your book over the last week, I've been like, all right, can I just make a phone call? And even if I just say at the beginning, look,

I only have five minutes, but I wanted to at least just say hi instead of text. Yeah. Now I usually don't because I only have five minutes. And so I send a text and it's efficient, but I realized like, what if I just, you know, very clearly was like, okay, I don't have much time, but we could still talk for two minutes. I can hear your voice for two minutes. I can, I can connect a little more meaningfully. And so already this week, I've had more conversations with family members than I've had in a while. I love it.

Your work's doing great things, Chris. Oh, this makes me very happy. And one thing that I think we can all do for the analog and the digital things we have in our lives is to make a little Venn diagram of sorts in our thinking on these worlds. So we have the activities we can only do digitally. So typing an email is something we can only do digitally. There's the circle of activities we can only do the analog way. You know, going for a run through nature. And then we have the activities that we can do in both worlds,

where these two circles meet in the middle. And those are the activities where I think the preponderance of our activities fit in that small circle, where we can divide those up into ones we want to do efficiently. We're probably already doing the ones we want to do efficiently in the digital world. This is something I found in myself. But we also have a lot of opportunities for more meaning, you know, in writing a letter, in calling somebody, in knocking on the door of their house, like the olden days, in consuming even the daily newspaper or a magazine, right? We can do that the analog way. That was one of the best trades I made in

my own journey for Calm, is trading in digital news. I don't consume any digital news anymore. And instead, an old-timey collection of pieces of paper shows up on my morning doorstep, and it refreshes once a day. It has my daily briefing. It has everything I need to know for the day. It's called a newspaper. And I love it. I think I'm one of the only people left in my town that subscribes to it. But I'm very happy, especially in my age demographic.

But I'm very happy doing that. I think realizing that calm is found in the analog, whereas efficiency is found in the digital is so critical. Meaning's there too. Meaning is there too, yes. You know, maybe we'll just close here with something that you say, which is that we need to balance between striving and savoring. So maybe we'll just end with that idea of balance, because a lot of what we've talked about has been about how do we balance these different things? Say a little bit more about that as we close. I think it comes down to intentionality. If I've learned one thing about productivity, too, it's that it comes down to intention. You know, the most productive people are not the ones who do more, more, more, faster,

faster, faster. They're the ones who live deliberately and intentionally. And I think that's what it comes down to. And with striking the balance between striving and savoring, it's all about the balance that we want. You know, we so often have this default tendency to adopt the same values that the people around us have. And I think this is a reason why we take on so much hidden chronic stress. It's the reason we crave more of everything that we have is that we look around

and everybody else is doing the same. And we think that in order to be happy, that's what we need to do too. But the last place we should be looking for happiness advice is the modern world. People are miserable. People are anxious, burnt out, at least a lot of the people that I know. You know, luckily there is that path, and fortunately, it's almost a gift that the path to presence and Fortunately, it's almost a gift that the path to presence and productivity right now, it runs directly through calm. Because calm is what gives us presence. It's what gives us engagement. It's what affords us a capacity and ability and awareness to manifest our values through our actions.

And when we live our values, you know, that is what creates meaning. And I think that's what this is ultimately all about. You know, a book like this, it can provide you with that capacity and it's up to you what you do with it, but hopefully reflecting on values along the way. Yeah. Living by our values is always such an important thing. Chris, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. As always, we'll have links in the show notes to where people can get the book and to your website. And we're going to put your stimulation height chart out there too. And again, I'll put mine out there too. All right. It's a commitment.

There it is. I'll do it. Oh, love it. All right. Thank you for having me. Such a pleasure. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really

podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what in the museum of failure and does your dog truly love you we have the answer go to really know really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really know really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts