Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 281 of the Wildly Successful Lifestyle podcast. I hope this finds you full of hopefulness for what the future will bring. No matter what you’re going through right now, just know that it can and will get better, because you create your life and if something isn’t going as planned, you have the power to change your perspective on it.
Notice I didn’t say the power to CHANGE it, because sometimes that thing isn’t going to change or maybe it doesn’t even need to change, you just need to look at it in a way that empowers you.
It’s easier said then done, I know, and it used to frustrate me to no end when I heard that but now that I actively do it and have been doing it in my own life I know how powerful it is to realize I can find a way to feel empowered even when things look bleak. That’s our work
I was listening to Micheal Easter, the author of Comfort Crisis, he was on Peter Attia’s podcast and he was talking about how boredom is a lost art.
We don’t allow ourselves to be bored anymore. Did you know that when you are bored, it allows your brain to actually have the freedom to think and create from your own personal set of life experiences rather than what you are currently reading on social media or watching on Netflix? It also gives your brain a break. I liken it to sitting in a beautiful, minimalistic space that has only natural colors and no clutter, just very serene, my brain rests so well in a space like that, however I have a friend that loves lots and lots of color and finds it very boring and uninspiring to be in a space like that, she would prefer to have lots of colors and pattern all in the same space which feels chaotic to me. That’s how I feel when Im constantly taking in social media, or constantly distracted, my brain can’t rest. For me, that’s like constant distraction, I cannot be creative in a space like that because it doesn’t allow my brain to rest.
I have realized that it is very easy for me fall into distraction if I allow myself to live from my primal brain. I’ve talked about this a lot, one of my distractions of choice is twitter, if you’ve been listening a while you know I struggle with it, but Ive been doing a little test and Ive noticed my mood gets very low when Ive spent time there. Part of it is what Im consuming on twitter most of it’s not positive, but the other part of it, is my being sort of disgusted with myself for wasting time there. What is the draw and then I heard Brooke Castillo talking about how she’s realized it’s super easy for her to get dragged into spending hours on Instagram and she has had to start giving herself time limits. But she also talked about how we have the choice of where we get our dopamine. The problem with dopamine coming from concentrated things like social media, or donuts is the brain gets SOOOO much pleasure immediately from it, it’s hard for other things to compete, so spending time on twitter, social media, and video games, makes real life seem a little boring. Eating a diet full of sugar like donuts and cake makes eating a salad or clean protein not taste so delicious. so it goes back to…do you want short term concentrated pleasure that’s going to make you feel like kaka later or do you want to take control of your life and choose intentionally where your dopamine comes from so that you have long term pleasure and success….
When are we going to realize that distractions like social media, news, tv shows, they are addictive by design and consuming them regularly isn’t moving us forward.
SO I tried something. I wondered what would happen if I took a sabbatical from twitter for a whole week.
And so that’s what I did. Let me tell you what came from it. The amount of time I spent on twitter had to get used up in another way. So during that week, I found 2 fabulous new podcasts about nutrition for women and hormones and I took the time to finish a book I had started and I also ordered two new books that really helped me discover some new areas I hadn’t thought about. It is extremely eye opening for me. So much valuable time wasted on twitter, and I noticed it’s simply a distraction because I got so much more done because I was intentional and present and not distracted and I felt so much better. Feeling better mentally and physically because those two are so closely tied.
The interesting thing to me is that by the second day I was feeling so much better mentally that I didn’t want to go on it and by the 5th day I didn’t even think about it. It happened that fast.
This was a shocking statistic to me but did you know that studies now show the average person spends 11 hours on technology a day. There’s no way you say. But unfortunately it’s true. That includes your computer, iPad, tv phone. What are we missing out on in the physical world in front of us by being heads down in our phone all the time? I was waiting for my car to be fixed a few weeks ago and there were 5 or 6 other people in the waiting area, everyone heads down. I decided to just sit there to see how it felt. It was a bit weird and then I noticed there were local magazines on the table and so I flipped through them, I actually came across a new little shop I didn’t know existed all because I chose to do something a little different. `Noticing the world in front of us, being present with the people around us, allowing ourselves to be bored once in a while, who knew these simple things would be so important to creating a life we want.
So we spend a lot of time on things that are not moving us forward.
All of those things we tell ourselves we don’t have time for, we probably do, it’s just that our brain would rather not go through the discomfort of doing them when we can get a quick and easy dopamine hit from technology.
My challenge for you this week is to notice when you tell yourself you don’t have time to do something and be honest with yourself….do you not have time or would you simply rather get on your iPhone, TV or computer because you’re more excited by what’s happening there then the idea of working on yourself or being present with your family or friends. When you do more of one the other gets less desirable. I love you guys, I’ll talk to you in a few days.
