Shadowing Practice: If YOU Can’t Focus, You NEED to See This (Science Backed) - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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I grew up in a very disorganized home where like the doors inside my house had holes in them
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and our house there was like some rooms
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that looked like a hoarder lived there just piles and piles of stuff to the roof um house demolished in many respects.
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Like the back of the garden was six foot high.
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It was a mess.
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So I've grown up. with mess.
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And I'm therefore still pretty messy today.
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And it's something I've always wanted to defeat, but I just, sometimes I tell myself, well, you know, it was hardwired into me when I was a kid, and it is just who I am.
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And a lot of people go around saying that.
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They've just kind of...
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identified with and accepted a certain bad habit is part of who they are.
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Well, I will say that some of the Most brilliant people I know had terribly messy offices.
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And they were very internally organized people.
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It was kind of interesting.
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They were like a laser beam in their ability to kind of sort through mess.
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They didn't see the mess.
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In fact, my postdoc advisor, who also sadly passed away, an incredible human by the name of Ben Barris, used to walk into his office and there'd just be piles of stuff everywhere.
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And I'd say, "Ben, I think we should clean your office." And he'd say, "Don't touch anything because if you move anything, I won't know where it is." And I said, "How could you possibly know where anything is right now?" And he'd say,
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"I know where everything is." And so I think some people also, by growing up in or being in that environment,
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also maintain an uncanny to find things, whereas I'm the sort of person where I can't do any work until everything is cleared away.
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And so I see myself as on the weaker side of this ability.
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But to your question, I think stories are very powerful and very dangerous.
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Stories are, the way that humans organize knowledge by and large, right?
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We don't tend to, organize things into lists, we have these narratives that we call stories because from a young age,
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We learn things not just by hearing them and seeing them, but they are...
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compartmentalized into narratives that have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
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Sometimes they have a kind of a crescendo and then a relaxation.
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Just think about a childhood song of learning like the ABCs.
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They don't teach you the ABCs, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, right?
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They don't do that.
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What do they do?
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They give you a song, which is a story.
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Musicians will understand this inherently.
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Again, I'm not one, but when I started researching neuroscience of music and the brain came to understand.
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So it's A, B, C, D, E, F, G, right?
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the change in the inflections as one does the alphabet as a young kid, is the story of the alphabet.
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Now people might say, okay, what is he talking about?
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What's happening here is you create variation in terms of batching of ideas so that something has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
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So if you think, okay, I grew up in this house, and it was really messy, and now I have too much mess.
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And in order to undo that, there's this kind of like, hardwired, right, dangerous words, hardwired neural circuitry in my brain that I would have to work really,
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really hard to undo, scared into being a cleaner person or a more tidier person, whatever it is.
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That's very dangerous because there's a beginning to that, a middle to that, and an end to that, and it has immense meaning as a consequence.
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One of the most powerful things is to understand
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that neuroplasticity really involves taking an existing story and dismantling some component of it.
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What could the component be?
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Well, there's all this stuff like the Byron Katie work, which says, you know, you take something that you believe as true and you say, okay, like I'm an untidy person and then you counter it.
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"How do I know that?" Well, okay, I have this experience.
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Okay, that's the story.
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And then you start running counter narratives.
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You say, "I'm, I'm, actually a tidy person.
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And then people say, well, this is silly.
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You're just lying to yourself, right?
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Where they say, is it always true that you're a messy person?
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You start challenging this story from different sides.
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Now, I believe, because I'm a neuroscientist, I'm not a psychologist or in the self -help world.
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that the brilliance, the kind of unconscious genius of that approach is,
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actually that what one is doing is you're starting to create a new story.
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You're starting to kind of infuse different questions into the existing neural network.
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Now, the brain loves questions.
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Like the brain, since we're young kids, we're asking questions.
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And so if you take an existing story and you start challenging it with questions, you're not saying lie to yourself.
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You're not suddenly going to say, okay, like I'm super tidy.
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You're not going to, because you're not going to believe that.
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But if you start challenging why it's that way, or, you know, you've been able to change so many other things, why would you to be able to change that.
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When you say, "Well, it's just a habit, I can't do it." You say, "Well, what's a habit?" And you start poking and pushing and pushing.
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What you eventually arrive at is this kind of,
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Huh, actually, there's nothing keeping me from being a tidy person except this kind of fluency of a particular story.
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And what you've done is you've interrupted the fluency of that story.
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So then when you go to the behavior of, you know, do you set things down all over the place or do you put them in an orderly fashion, you start interrupting the habit,
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the fluency of your typical behavior.
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So I raised this as a way to kind of shine light on, essentially what, I do in my podcast career, which is, you know, we,
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I believe very strongly in the fields of psychology.
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I think self -help has some wonderful things to offer.
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We've got ancient wisdom that goes way back.
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And when you start to look at things through the lens of biology, you start to see that all of these things actually have merit and they're just different paths to the same outcomes.
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So if you wanted to become a tidy person, I would encourage you, here would be one, let's just say neuroscience supported approach,
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would be to write out one page about what a tidy person you really are, you'll know that's a lie, right?
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And then to look at it and realize that in many ways, if you just replace tidy with messy at any location,
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it'd probably be the exact same story.
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And so what you're really talking about here is just a default that your nervous system is running.
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And if you were to just swap the words, would you feel differently or do differently?
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On the one hand, you'd say, no, that's kind of trivial, but I bet you the practice of writing it out would forever interrupt your notion of like, just going to set something down and be like,
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ah, now you have something to kind of disrupt the habit.
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of habit disruption that you'll look like.
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Some people say, oh, you flick a rubber band on your wrist or something like that.
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There's nothing special about the rubber band.
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There's nothing special about the pain on your wrist or that you put a sticky note.
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We know sticky notes work for about one day.
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Why don't sticky notes work?
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Why don't reminders on the mirror work?
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Because they don't have enough salience.
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They're not new.
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They're not different.
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The nervous system only changes if something is new and different.
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So anyway, we could talk a lot about habit formation, but fear works, but so does disrupting the story.
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How do you disrupt the story?
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essentially give the opposite story and you think, well, that's just lying to myself.
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But neurally it makes sense because, The nervous system, again, likes to be very economical, likes to do everything with the minimum amount of energetic expenditure.
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And to change anything requires attention, and attention is expensive.
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Attention is expensive.
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And also I would say, as I'm, kind of rambling all this, things are going very well for you.
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So you actually don't have any reason to tidy your space.
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- I have a PA now and another PA and I have a clean assets.
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Do you know what I mean?
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- Yeah, you outsource it.
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- Yeah.
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- Great.
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Well, there is incentive for all the folks that feel like they're not tidy enough.
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You have two choices.
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You can either start to be tidy now, or you can be successful enough that you can hire some assistants.
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And I actually think, I say this in all seriousness, I think that one has to ask like, where is my attention in neural real estate best devoted?
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I mean, we are living in a war. of attention.
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I wake up in the morning and I can be a consumer or a creator.
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If I reach for my phone, "I'm a consumer.
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"If I go to my journal, I'm a creator."
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My advice to anyone who wants to be successful in any domain is to do things away from
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where you broadcast and then take it to that broadcast.
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I mean, take your real life, to Instagram.
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and be very cautious about taking Instagram to your real life.
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Does that make sense?
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If you look at successful people, they're doing things away from the platforms and putting them on the platforms.
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So I have to be very careful.
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Then I go into the kitchen, obviously, talk to people in my home. But...
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If I pick up the phone and I start making a phone call, it's like, is this call really about moving the needle forward,
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or is this just kind of like passive use of attention?
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We have to be so careful nowadays.
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So, so careful.
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It's really challenging.
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On that point of focus and attention, and thinking back to when you were 19 years old, one of the things people ask me a lot, and I guess it's a bit of a debate in the self -help world, is from a neuroscience perspective,
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is manifestation and this idea of like visualization, visualizing who I want to become and, you know, where I'm going.
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Is there any neuroscience to support that that works?
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There is.
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And I'm not trying to be negative, but I'll start with the negative counterexample for which there is...
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and it's less often discussed.
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So there's a wonderful researcher at New York University by the name of Emily Balchettis,
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who talks about how for goal setting and habit formation, Fear setting is often one of the best tools.
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You spend some time, maybe five minutes or so, thinking about all the terrible things that are going to happen if you don't actually accomplish your goals.
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Nobody likes to do this, but guess what?
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It turns out to be pretty darn effective.
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- Really?
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- I know.
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It's really frustrating that this is the case.
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But again, that has a lot to do with the way that the human brain is wired and likes to rewire itself.
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Now, that said, it is important to envision goals.
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visualizing goals in detail, writing them out, in some cases talking about them, although we can discuss that,
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why that might not be the best idea in every circumstance.
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can be very beneficial because it's hard to conceive something that you can't imagine.
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But I think when people hear that visualizing goals or visualizing outcomes is critical, we sometimes forget that we don't always know what the end goal is.
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Sometimes we have to break this up into milestones.
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This is where I think Rick Rubin, even though he's not a formally trained scientist, has drawn a lot of interest for his work on creativity,
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which is, you know, Rick is about largely, you know, sensing the kind of energetic pull of an idea
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and being able to explore that without too much self -judgment or filtering or thinking about how it's going to be
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received in other words that the metamorphosis
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that leads to great music great poetry great scientific discovery podcasts finance companies
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that one is building etc is a series of iterations
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that occur on the time course of about a day you know
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and so we can't always imagine the end
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or the end product as the outcome this is why i said university is easy compared to other goals
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because the end is a degree right
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so you pick up your diploma like whereas in other areas it's far more mysterious often.
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Now, Visualization, I think, can be very powerful.
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But perhaps what's more powerful is to learn the brain and body state that best serves the work you're going to do.
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So for instance, if I'm going to do some writing, and right now I'm working on a book, it's largely done, but I'm writing some bonus chapters,
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unless I'm hyper motivated to do that when I sit down and hyper focused, I'll spend...
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two, three minutes, just closing my eyes, focusing on my breathing.
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It's meditation of sorts.
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But what I tell myself is if I can't focus on my breathing for two or three minutes, how in the world am I going to focus on writing?
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Four.
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"two or three hours," that sort of thing.
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The other thing that I wanna make sure I don't forget is, I mentioned that telling people your goals oftentimes can be useful if it stimulates a little bit of fear, like you have some accountability.
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But we also know that...
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because of the affiliative nature of in particular people that support us, there is this danger.
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A friend of mine who's a cardiologist at UCSF, He said, "Be careful who you tell that you're going to start a podcast
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or write a book." Because oftentimes the response will be, "Oh yeah, that's great.
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You absolutely should write a book or you should do a podcast."
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And people get a sort of reward from telling people about it.
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And then they never actually go do it.
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Whereas I can cite numerous examples of where people were told, "You're never going to be able to do that." you're never gonna be able to be successful in that.
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My goodness, those people dig their heels, and they show that they can do it.
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Now, I get into debates about this with Rick from time to time.
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It's unclear to me whether or not the energy around trying to prove oneself is detrimental to the outcome.
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and I sense it is, right?
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This kind of grinding against like, oh, take that, and take that, as opposed to just doing things out of real love of craft.
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I think about the way I felt about Aquaria and fish as a kid, and it's just like pure delight.
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That's the word that comes to mind, just delight.
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I wanna learn more about it.
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I wanna do it and tell people about it.
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That's the wonderful romantic picture of, effort and progress and outcomes.
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But in reality, you probably need both.
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You need to be able to access some fear and sense of competition, but also delight in craft.
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You know, like Peter Thiel's book, "Zero to One," as I recall, defines competition as anti -creativity in many ways,
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because through competition, you are by definition, changing what you're doing in order to outdo somebody else or something else.
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And so you're morphing your creation in order to kind of overcome something.
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Whereas if you're just purely thinking about something you want to grow and cultivate, there are none of those barriers.
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But, in the worlds that I've been in, Science.
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To a lesser extent, podcasting, and that's a wonderful feature of podcasting, but certainly in science, it is hyper -competitive, right?
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Two laboratories working on similar things, people are concerned that - If one publishes first, the other will not be able to publish, certainly not in as high quality a journal.
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And jobs are created through these journal publications.
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Podcasting is actually a wonderful field because let's say you and I have the same guest on our podcast.
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All it does is raise it in the algorithm.
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It's not like, you know, and it's such a, and so I think there's a lot of collegiality
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and camaraderie in the podcast field that exists in little pockets in science.
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brutally competitive field, which doesn't mean it's anti -creative, but in a dream world where there's infinite amount of money for scientific research,
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because that would better humanity in my view, and people didn't have to be competitive about grant dollars or publication,
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I think we would make far more progress as a species.
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So competition fosters a outcomes.
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This is clear in markets.
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It's clear in a lot of domains, but pure love and delight of craft and creativity, that's definitely the way to go.
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But in most endeavors, you gotta have both.
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If sitting next to someone in class and realizing, okay, 'cause this was me back when I'm thinking, okay, I love this topic, but gosh, I want that top mark.
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I want that top mark on the distribution.
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Like that's good.
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"She and he are really, really good.
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"And we're gonna study together.
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"But my God, when it comes time for that exam, "like I'm going for it." A little bit of competition can bring out our best, I think, certainly in sport.
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But when it comes to creative endeavors that are really about our own unique contribution, I mean, you could tell me more about this in business because I don't, you know, I have a company,
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but I'm not a business person.
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But I always feel like competition can bring out more energy but not more creativity.
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Yeah, and I think a big point I was thinking as you were talking was just about how much you let
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that new energy that comes from competition distract you.
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And it's the distraction that can destroy you.
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Because if Apple are going this way and they're building this product without the keyboard and without the stylus,
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and they've got their vision and they see Samsung doing something over there.
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And if they divert from their own mission and their own first principles towards what someone else are doing, then that's when it can become destructive.
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and invest more in their vision, then it's okay.
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I think that's, and it is this dichotomy between competition does drive better outcomes for everybody that's competing, but at the same time,
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yeah, it can harm you if it distracts you in a fundamental way.
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It's kind of how I think about it, even with podcasting, like, You know, um...
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As you were saying, there's so many podcasters doing so many amazing things.
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I look at your podcast and I learn from it, but I know in my core, and we all know I'm never going to be Andrew Huberman.
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And I'll never be you.
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And I'll never be a Joe Rogan.
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I'll never be a Lex.
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And I admire your podcast very much, and Joe's and Lex's.
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I think we each have our own unique style that we bring to it.
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Chris Williamson.
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It's...
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been a lot of fun to see the unique flavors of podcasts crop up.
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Yeah.
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And how similar that is to the world I grew up in in skateboarding, the observations of from the music industry that I saw firsthand or that, you know, Rick has passed along,
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you know, In the end, I think, Any creative endeavor is really about, and here, I don't want to sound mysterious or woo, it's about the energy that we bring.
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It's about, taking our life history and bringing it to that thing in whatever form.
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We don't even need to tell people our life history.
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Taking our unique wiring and bringing it to that thing.
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And we can again, look at things through the lens of biology and say, well, what are we talking about when we're talking about energy?
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What is this energy thing that people are talking about?
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And I think it largely boils down to these catecholamines,
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the dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine cocktail that is setting the brain into a mode of attention, of motivation.
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We now know dopamine is more about motivation to seek rewards as opposed to feeling of motivation pleasure or reward, there's a lot to be said about that.
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And keep in mind that these three neurochemicals dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine,
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has been the neurochemical cocktail by which humans and other mammals have set and pursued goals for hundreds of thousands of years.
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So we don't have like a unique system,
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a unique neurochemical system for seeking out of mates versus food versus creating shelter versus creating technology.
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and whole societies.
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And it's not just these three neurochemicals.
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Certainly there are other things involved, acetylcholine and a bunch of other things, neuroplasticity for that matter, but it's,
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Clearly the case that the currency that the brain has set around getting us into forward center of mass, as I say, to like envision something, explore.
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Nope, not down there, this way, ah.
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"There's a cent here." And trade out an actual cent, "Oh, there's something interesting here.
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"There's someone interesting here." And like exploring that, no, that's a dead path to, cul -de -sac, turn around, go, oh, here.
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And then connecting these nodes of progress.
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What's progress?
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Ah, there's kind of another surge of these catecholamines, which sets us in forward center of mass.
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you know, I don't want to oversimplify the biology, but when we talk about energy, for instance, taking Time to rest at night.
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taking time to maybe meditate a few minutes, or do this practice that I'm a huge fan of, non -sleep deep rest, which is kind of a body scan,
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deep relaxation, long exhales, It's a practice very similar to an ancient practice called yoga nidra, which has been practiced for thousands of years.
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It's a kind of pseudo sleep.
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And we know from a really nice study that NSDR, non -sleep deep rest, AKA yoga nidra.
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can increase the baseline levels of dopamine in a brain area called the basal ganglia,
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which is for, action generation and also withholding action by about 60 % from baseline,
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just a short period of doing this practice can kind of re -up dopamine levels to a considerable extent.
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It's a remarkable study and there are others like it.
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So what does that mean?
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Well, it means that in rest, we build up this capacity to be forward center of mass when we emerge from rest.
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That's why I think we have to sleep every 24 hours.
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This is why practices where we deliberately calm ourselves and still ourselves, allow us to be more forward center of mass mentally and physically afterwards.
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It's kind of a duh when we hear it, we kind of go, oh, duh, of course, rest, action, rest, action.
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But There's a lot more to it.
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If you start exploring the layers, you start realizing that excitement for things versus burnout.
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What's burnout?
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It's just trying to be forward center of mass for too long.
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you know, misuse of our dopamine circuitry.
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It's, you know, ignoring the fact that these catecholamines and dopamine in particular, they are, not infinite in their availability, right?
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There's a reservoir of them.
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that can be depleted, but it can be replenished as well.
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And one of the best analogies for this was actually explained to me by a guy named Dr. Kyle Gillette.
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He does some online work as a public facing physician, endocrinology in particular.
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And he said, "With dopamine, it's kind of like a wave pool.
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You have this reservoir that can allow you to pursue things or scroll the internet or build businesses, whatever it is.
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If you are really forward center of mass very intensely, you start generating these waves.
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And if you get big waves of dopamine, and they crash out of the pool, you start depleting the reservoir.
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So when I think about drugs of abuse like cocaine, which leads to huge surges in dopamine, or amphetamines, huge surges in dopamine.
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What do we know about huge surges in dopamine?
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Well, after those huge surges, you drop below your initial baseline to a state in which the same thing doesn't feel as good anymore.
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You need so much more energy to get the same output.
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That's what this is, right?
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That's what this is.
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I'll put this on the screen for anyone.
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Yeah, so my colleague at Stanford, Dr. Anna Lemke, who runs our dual diagnosis addiction clinic and wrote the wonderful book, "Dopamine Nation," described this best.
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You know, it's sort of like a seesaw, but whereby you get a big peak in dopamine, let's say from a drug of abuse like cocaine.
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People on cocaine, it's all about ideas and what's next.
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They're not like, "Hey, let's just kick back." It's all about what's, in fact, they have a million ideas per second.
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Most of them are terrible ideas, but they're very forward center of mass motivated.
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And then when the drug wears off, they feel very low and very depressed.
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The dopamine is actually depleted below baseline.
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People that work excessively, We all have different abilities to work out, but people that work excessively and abuse stimulants in order to do that achieve these peaks.
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Is that like, so what would be an everyday example of that working excessively?
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Do you mean like, pre -workout or something, what you mean?
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- Yeah, I'm not anti -pre -workout.
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Listen, I love to be well -rested, hydrated, have a nice pre -workout drink, maybe even a little shot of espresso,
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listen to some music, and have an incredible leg day workout.
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It's an amazing feeling, right?
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But if you do that every single time, you start stacking all these catecholamine release -inducing drugs, okay?
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So you're getting adrenaline, you're getting epinephrine, which is adrenaline, excuse me.
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You're getting adrenaline, you're getting noradrenaline, also called norepinephrine.
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You're getting dopamine release.
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You're highly motivated.
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You're in that state that everyone is seeking.
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And you try and do that seven days a week, "You're not gonna do it." And then you wonder why in the afternoon, you're just completely cooked and you can't do any cognitive work.
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Well, your dopamine and other things have crashed below baseline.
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So I think it's important to understand that being, as I'm calling it, forward center of mass,
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like really kind of motivated and pursuing goals is great.
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But most of the time, we're probably
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best off just coming off the gas pedal just a little bit to maintain
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that ability to continue to be forward center of mass.
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The same thing is true for stress.
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We hear stress is bad.
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Well, stress is bad, but it also sharpens your ability to learn.
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It creates energy.
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It actually boosts your immune system in the short term.
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I say, "Tolerate as much stress as you can, provided you still behave like a kind person, right?
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Don't say or do things that are unkind.
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and make sure that you still get great sleep at night.
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Most people, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, run around, and then they can't sleep at night.
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And then the next day they're depleted.
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A little bit of stress is healthy.
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Life is stressed, things are stressful.
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But again, you're going to be in your best state of mind if you're calm and alert.
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Alert and calm is the magic recipe and the ability to sleep at night.
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If you want to take a bunch of pre -workout
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and you want to listen to some loud music and have a great crush it workout, great.
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But you should probably also be able to train without all of that.
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Yeah.
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If you're somebody who loves new goals and you're very excited about travel and this and that, great.
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But do you have to layer in 50 things
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and then you're sitting around at home and you're wondering why you're
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so bored when you're back home and why life is so depressing and you need more travel, more stimulation?
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In every domain of life, we see whether or not it's food or exercise or stimulants or sex or...
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Media, if you push things to the max, you're going to feel depleted and understimulated afterwards.
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And this trough below baseline, as Anna Lemke taught us with Dopamine Nation, that trough is a state that can last a long time.
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And it's how long it's proportional to how high that peak in dopamine was.
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Not how long, but how high that peak in dopamine was.
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And when you're in that trough, that dopamine depleted state,
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Typically what people do is they try and go out or access things that are going to reactivate the dopamine circuitry,
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and all it does is drive them further and further and longer and longer into that trough.
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What's needed is a period of waiting, of nonindulgence in any of these excesses.
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that allows them to return to baseline.
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We know this from drugs of abuse.
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It takes more and more drug to try and get what turns out to be less and less of a high.
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Most all addiction, most all compulsive behavior can be cured essentially through a period of abstinence lasting somewhere between 30
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and 60 days, which to somebody who's highly motivated to seek that thing or do that thing, sounds like an absolute horror, but that is highly effective.
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So for some people it's work and stimulants, you know, a number of people taking Adderall and work, work, work, work, I hear from these people all the time.
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Typically they are from the tech and finance world.
364
And they're like, why am I burnt out?
365
Well, you've been blasting these catecholamine, regulated circuits for years, you need to just except you're going to feel a little low for a week.
366
Then you're going to feel a little less low.
367
Then you're going to come back to baseline.
368
And then, and only then, can you really get back into, like, full forward center of mass.
369
But at that point, you can introduce, you know, I do think there is, a clinical use case for certain ADHD meds, which are amphetamine.
370
There are certain people that need those meds.
371
Other people have driven themselves into this dopamine trough.
372
And so they're seeking out anything and everything to get them out of that trough, when really what they need to do is stay away from all that stuff and just wait.
373
Just wait.
374
Go on holiday or something.
375
Go on holiday, try and find reward in smaller things.
376
You know, this is why dogs are wonderful in simpler things. are.
377
a bit in the dopamine loop.
378
I've been in these loops before.
379
They're hard to exit, but once you exit them, you look back on them, you go, "What was I thinking?" Well, you were in a different state.
380
You're kind of a different animal when you're in pursuit.
381
If you love the Dariova CEO brand and you watch this channel, please do me a huge favor, become part of the 15 % of the viewers on this channel that have hit the subscribe button.
382
It helps us tremendously, and the bigger the channel gets, the bigger the guests.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “If YOU Can’t Focus, You NEED to See This”. This video has 382 sentences and 5326 words to shadow. The speech runs for 28:31. The speaker talks fast, about 187 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 83% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| dopamine noun | /ˈdoʊ.pəˌmin/ | A monoamine C₈H₁₁NO₂ that is a decarboxylated form of dopa, present in the body as a neurotransmitter and a precursor of other substances including adrenalin. |
| podcast noun | /ˈpɑdˌkæst/ | A program, especially an audio program, produced on a regular basis, delivered over the Internet in a compressed digital format and designed for playback on… |
| tidy adjective | /ˈtaɪ.di/ | Arranged neatly and in order. |
| baseline noun | /ˈbeɪslaɪn/ | A line that is a base for measurement or for construction. |
| trough noun | /tɹɔθ/ | A long, narrow container, open on top, for feeding or watering animals. |
| workout noun | /ˈwɝk.aʊ̯t/ | An exercise session; a period of physical exercise. |
| catecholamine noun | /katəˈkəʊləmiːn/ | Any of a class of aromatic amines derived from pyrocatechol that are hormones produced by the adrenal gland. |
| deplete verb | /dɪˈplit/ | To reduce the amount of; to remove (a substance from something) |
| motivate verb | /ˈmoʊ.tɪ.veɪt/ | To provide someone with an incentive to do something; to encourage; to actuate. |
| messy adjective | /ˈmɛsi/ | In a disorderly state; chaotic; disorderly. |
| neurochemical adjective | Of or pertaining to neurochemistry, the study of the chemical basis of nerve and brain activity | |
| neuroscience noun | The scientific study of the nervous system. | |
| visualize verb | /ˈvɪʒuəˌlaɪz/ | To perceive (something) visually; to see. |
| surge noun | /sɝd͡ʒ/ | A sudden transient rush, flood or increase. |
| delight noun | /dəˈlaɪt/ | Joy; pleasure. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| bring out verb | To elicit, evoke, or emphasize (a particular quality). |
| pick up verb | To lift; to grasp and raise. |
| build up verb | To erect; to construct. |
| clear away verb | To tidy up, to remove mess or obstacles from a place to make it neat. |
| come off verb | To become detached. |
| go around verb | To move or spread from person to person. |
| go out verb | To leave, especially a building. |
| pass along verb | To deliver a message or item to its intended recipient. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- You say, "I'm, I'm, actually a tidy person.
- Where they say, is it always true that you're a messy person?
- How do you disrupt the story?
- Do you know what I mean?
- What do we know about huge surges in dopamine?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if you move anything, I won't know · If one publishes first, the other will not |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've grown · I've always wanted · you've been |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was hardwired · is cleared · is wired |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | song, which is · career, which is · anyone who wants |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 143 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, I'm, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: trough /tɹɔθ/, algorithm /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: visualize /ˈvɪʒuəˌlaɪz/, envision /ɪnˈvɪʒn̩/, visualization /ˌvɪʒ.ʊ.ə.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, relaxation /rᵻˌlækˈseɪ.ʃən/, addiction /əˈdɪkˌʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: catecholamine /katəˈkəʊləmiːn/, creativity /kri.eɪˈtɪv.ᵻ.ti/, epinephrine /ˌɛp.ɪˈnɛ.fɹɪn/, excessively /ɪkˈsɛsɪvli/, norepinephrine /ˌnɔːɹɛpɪˈnɛfɹɪn/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like dopamine, podcast, tidy.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.