Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you never miss another episode. And if you're out there and you want to learn more about how to create the perfect morning routine, I created a free video and workbook at theperfectmorningroutine.com.
You can go ahead and download it so that you can learn based off of science how you can create the perfect morning routine and a checklist to help you check off the boxes to get it done.
Once again, theperfectmorningroutine.com. Today we're going to be talking about something that I think almost every single person listening to this is probably struggling with, even if you don't realize it yet. And it's this. Your brain is overstimulated as hell. And because of that, life doesn't feel the same anymore. Food doesn't taste the same. Music doesn't feel the same that it used to.
Conversations don't feel as deep anymore. Your goals don't excite you like they used to. You pick up your phone without even realizing it and you scroll for 20 minutes and somehow then you feel worse. And then most people, what do they think after that? Think, oh, well, I'm just lazy or maybe I'm depressed or maybe I've just lost my passion for life or maybe there's something wrong with me.
And the truth is, there might not be anything wrong with you. You might actually just be overstimulated. Your brain might be so flooded with dopamine hits throughout the entire day that it has novelty and notifications and fast content and sugar and caffeine and scrolling and video games and porn and multitasking and constant input so that your normal life
literally does not feel exciting anymore. And so your nervous system never really gets a rest. Your attention is constantly moving and going from one thing to another all day long, and your brain never really gets a moment to chill.
And boredom, which is just basically a complete lack of input, is actually one of the most important things that you can do for your own creativity, for your peace, for your joy, and for your motivation.
And so today I want to dive deep into how to dopamine detox, how to get past all of the overstimulation, why your life actually feels dull, what social media is actually doing to your brain, how to reset your nervous system, and also how to make simple life feel beautiful again. Because I want you to understand this. The goal is not to feel excited and hyped up all of the time.
The goal is to feel truly alive no matter what you're doing in life, even if it's nothing. So let's be real for just a second. I want to tell you how I got here and why this episode is important to me. About three or four years ago, I noticed that life started to feel really dull. And nothing was wrong in my life. There wasn't a big event that made it feel this way.
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Chapter 2: What causes life to feel dull and overstimulated?
And I get to travel. And I get great experiences. But like...
was like the life i was living it was like the saturation and all of the colors had been like turned down and i wasn't like depressed i just like wasn't excited like i wasn't excited about all of the travel and the experiences and i would get to a country i'd never been to before and see an amazing sunset i'd be like oh that's cool but it wasn't like exciting to me anymore
And I thought, this isn't good. What's wrong with me? What's going on? And me being who I am, I was like, what's going on in my nervous system? What's going on in my brain? And how do I actually fix this?
And the truth of all of this is that we all have to realize that there has never been a human in all of history before us whose brain had to process as much stimulation as ours do every single day. Never.
Never.
Your ancestors didn't wake up to alarms and emails and TikTok and Netflix and drink caffeine and listen to podcasts at 2x speed and send text messages to six different people and then consume political outrage and then watch porn and play video games and eat hyper-processed foods and then wonder why they feel anxious and numb. They never had to deal with that like we do.
Your nervous system evolved for nature where everything is slower. and more calm. And the problem is that your brain adapts to whatever environment you repeatedly place it in. And that's one of the most important things to understand about neuroscience is that your brain is constantly adapting.
So if you constantly feed it intense stimulation, fast dopamine spikes, novelty and speed and scrolling and negativity and video games and instant gratification, your brain starts expecting that level of stimulation all of the time, which means that everything that is not that level of stimulation feels boring as hell to you. And then your normal life actually just feels boring.
Watching your beautiful, amazing children play feels boring. It doesn't feel exciting to you because your dopamine baseline has been changed. And so let's talk about dopamine real quick. I talk about dopamine often with you guys. So I'm going to just fly through this part, but it's important to cover in case you're new here.
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Chapter 3: How does dopamine overload affect our daily experiences?
Dr. Anna Lembke from Stanford talks about this extensively. She does a lot of work on dopamine and addiction. She explains that the brain is constantly balancing between pleasure and pain. And we will be right back. And now back to the show. And when we overload ourselves with pleasure stimuli, what's crazy about it is that the brain compensates by pushing us towards pain.
So like numbness, irritability, anxiety, dissatisfaction, which is why after binge scrolling or binge watching something, you often feel worse, not better. And this is the crazy part. Most people think they need more stimulation because they feel numb. But the overstimulation is the reason why they feel numb in the first place.
And so your brain is essentially losing its ability to enjoy simple things. Like, have you ever noticed this? Like you'll scroll for, I don't know, 45 minutes. and then you'll try to sit quietly for five minutes and you feel like crawling out of your own skin, it can feel so uncomfortable to do nothing, can't it? Think about that for a second.
Like if you really think about it, you're doing nothing, nothing. Why would nothing feel uncomfortable? That doesn't make any sense if you actually think about it, right? Why? Because your nervous system has been conditioned for intensity. Like silence starts to feel uncomfortable. Stillness feels like something is wrong. And so your brain starts craving another hit.
It's basically like a drug addict, another video, another snack, another text message, another scroll, another refresh of social media, another dopamine spike. And this is why people like today say, oh, I can't focus. Oh, I just have a problem with my focus. No, you probably don't have an attention problem. You probably don't have a focus problem.
It's just that your attention has been fragmented. You have unconsciously trained yourself to be distracted all day, every day. Your brain has been trained to switch every eight seconds to a new thing. And there's actual research on this. Studies actually show that excessive digital stimulation and multitasking impair your attention span. It messes with your working memory.
It messes with your cognitive control. And so your brain becomes conditioned for shallow stimulation over like real depth of what's going on in your life and being deep in your life. And the truth is, depth is like where your meaning truly lives. Overstimulation destroys your depth. And so let's talk about how to actually do a dopamine detox, like what it means.
When people hear like dopamine detox, they like think like, what am I supposed to just enjoy nothing? Am I supposed to never enjoy anything? No, no, no. That's not the point. The point is not removing dopamine from your life. In fact, that's literally impossible to do. The point is reducing the artificial overstimulation.
long enough so that your brain can actually recalibrate your baseline in dopamine. That's it. You're trying to lower the noise so that your nervous system can remember what it feels like to just be normal again. I mean, phones have been out and social media has been out for so long that it's been 10, 15 years since most people have actually been back to normal.
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