Want To Upgrade Your Brain? Stop Doing These 7 Things Immediately.
“Your eyes can only see and your ears can only hear what your brain is looking for.” — Dan Sullivan
Your brain is a phenomenal tool.
Your brain will find whatever it is that you are looking for.
If you use your brain to chase impossible goals, you will attract the right methods and the right people to accomplish those goals.
You can transform yourself through your brain. You can give yourself skills, languages, and abilities, that are completely unfathomable to your current self, with your brain.
You can also get trapped in very slow and counterproductive rhythms with your brain.
How you use your brain is up to you.
You have greater capability and autonomy to build your own habits than ever before in the world we live in today, and yet most people are living a life of distraction.
Most people’s habits are literally destroying their brains.
With these destructive habits, you won’t be able to progress.
In this article, I will help you become aware of the 7 toxic and destructive habits that are destroying your brain. I’ll then give you the tools you need to train your brain how to get the results you want.
Really quick: there are actually 3 ways to enjoy this article:
1. Watch this YouTube video:
2. Listen to this episode of the Dr. Benjamin Hardy Show (available on any podcast streaming service)
3. Continue reading this article (includes bonus content not available anywhere else)
1. Starting Your Day Too Slow
“If we start right, it is easy to go right all the time; but if we start wrong, we may go wrong, and it will be a hard matter to get right.” — Joseph Smith, Jr.
The first toxic and destructive habit destroying your brain is starting too slow.
Most people train their brains to be slow.
Think about your brain in the beginning of your day.
How long does it take you to get out of bed in the morning?
What do you do first once you’re up?
What do you think about?
What do you read?
What do you watch?
What do you eat?
What do you look for?
There’s a large probability that your morning is keeping you stuck. Your brain can’t be in flow when you’ve conditioned it to be slow.
Most people are slow to start anything. Because our society is trained and wired for consumption, most people spend their morning consuming things on their phone. Because of this, they never get into a “FLOW” state during their day. Most people are so trapped in consumption they’re dependent upon it just to get going in the morning.
Do you wake up starting your brain FAST? Or do you wake up consuming junk that then (literally) scatters your brain?
Consuming junk in the morning puts your brain into a state of over-analysis. Over-analysis is crippling. Think about how many different ideas and bits of information you can find within 5 minutes on Instagram. Starting your day like this will leave your brain confused and scattered. You will be trapped in a state of over-analysis for the rest of the day.
Involving yourself in too many things before you start your real work cripples your success and creates unnecessary distractions. Being distracted makes you busy. Being busy makes your brain slow.
Rather than being busy, it’s far more powerful to have clarity about the #1 task, and then spend your energy in the morning doing that thing.
If you train your brain fast, get into a flow state, and do really important work, you can produce results at an astonishing rate.
Do you want to train your brain to be fast, in a flow state? Here’s how:
- Wake up
- Get out of bed
- Make your bed
- Get hydrated
- Move on to your #1 task AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE
When I say your #1 task, I mean important work that can change your life. Train your brain that you are capable of doing that task first. Because you are!
As an example, for me, it’s writing my books.
I wrote several books while I was still a PhD student and having 5 kids (now 6). This is because I woke up, did the first thing first in the morning, and then was primed to go fast all day. I was producing rather than consuming.
Start working on your #1 task first thing in the morning, and your brain will build its way to genius.
By following this process, you’ll start getting wins FAST in the morning. You’ll intentionally prime your brain to look for more ways to succeed and WIN that day. Your brain will be filtered to your goals and focused on doing, rather than consuming. You’ll train your brain to wake up along with your body, so that you can create massive progress. You will accomplish so much more, because you are going fast first, before anything else.
You’ll begin moving in the RIGHT direction as soon as you wake up.
If you get this piece right, you can accomplish more halfway through morning than most people do in a week because their brains are so slow.
2. Consuming Too Much
“Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.” — Cal Newport
The world has never had more information. Most of that information is like candy to your brain.
Most information is training your brain to have really low standards for yourself.
Most information is training your brain to seek entertainment, not education.
Most people consume WAY too much information, and still believe they need more. This is the mental equivalent of an obese person who thinks they’re hungry all the time. Most people want more and more stimulation and consumption, despite already having too much.
Continuing with the obesity analogy, most information is really low-quality. Most people don’t have a healthy information diet. Most people are after the low-hanging fruit, the “fast food” of information — easy to access and just as easily destructive to your mental focus. High-consumption, high-artificial information diets produce mediocre brain capacity at best.
Most people’s inputs are entertainment-based. Because your input shapes your outlook, most people have a far lower-quality view of the world than what it could be.
“Your input determines your outlook. Your outlook determines your output, and your output determines your future.” — Zig Ziglar
Most people are suffering from what psychologists call a low-level default future where they don’t have a big vision or high expectations for their life.
Most people are consuming information, food, and even people and experiences that have created a low-level worldview and identity for themselves.
Low-level becomes the standard for your brain when that’s what you feed it on a repetitive, daily basis.
Your brain is a prediction machine. It will take what you give it.
Your identity will perform with what it has to work with — what you give it. You cannot outperform your identity.
Because most people are overly consumed with information, situations, and people, with really low standards, their brains are expecting more of those very things.
To optimize your brain, consume less, and consume higher-quality information.
The 80–20, or Pareto principle, is true in all components of life. 80% of your results come from 20% of the things you do.
80% of the information you consume right now is literally holding you back from becoming your future self.
80% of the information you consume is lowering your vision of your future self.
Part of training your brain to become effective, phenomenal, and powerful, is to have clear filters and standards for what you say “yes” and “no” to.
Just as you want to train your brain to be fast and not slow, you want to train your brain to seek after quality and not quantity of information.
Whatever you let in signals to yourself that that it belongs within your filter.
If you say “yes” to junk media, that shows your standard.
It you say “yes” to wasting your time, that shows your standard.
What you say yes to is the future that your brain is both predicting and creating.
Your identity is that which you are most committed to. You can know what you are committed to most by your results, not by what you say you’re committed to.
Your current weight, your current income, and your current relationships are all things you are currently committed to. They are things you have accepted and said “yes” to in your life.
The 80% of what you learn to being saying “no” to, will leverage and multiply your new, higher standard.
Consume less, and you’ll have a much higher quality filter and standard for what you are willing to consume. You’ll raise the standard, and thus speed up your brain.
3. Doing Too Much
If you have more than three priorities, then you don’t have any.” — Jim Collins
If you’re trying to accomplish more than three things in a given day, you’re focused on shallow and busy work, not deep and productive work.
Every time you switch tasks, you take your brain out of flow-state. Switching tasks shatters your focus and wastes previous energy. Most people are used to task switching. They don’t know how to go deep in ONE thing at a time, because they’re not used to going for something big. Most people are task switching with their brain like a computer that has 50 tabs open.
If you want to accomplish REALLY big things, learn how to focus and go deep in concentration on ONE THING for 3–4 hours at a time. Most people will not do this.
As an example, when I film videos for my YouTube channel and podcast, I spend all day focused on just that ONE THING. I film video after video. I focus on just that one thing, rather than constantly switching tasks between many different things.
This is called batching. When you batch, your brain doesn’t have to spend mental energy switching between tasks. You save incredible energy by going deep in one area at a time.
This state is deep work, or deliberate practice.
The Jim Collins rule of having no more than 3 priorities applies not just to your life, but also to your month, to your week, and to each day.
When you have a thousand different things happening in one day, you’re not really focused on going deep in the few things that really matter.
The only way to vault obstacles and go really deep in your life is to go really, really deep.
This means doing way less in terms of numbers of activities, goals, and priorities, but doing way more in the things you are accomplishing and developing mastery in.
Most people are not clear about or connected with their future self. They don’t have a future self that’s massive and exciting, which keeps them trapped in the surface-level.
“By our nature as rational, conscious creatures, we cannot help but think of the future. But most people, out of fear, limit their view of the future to a narrow range. Thoughts of tomorrow, a few weeks ahead, perhaps a vague plan for the months to come.
We are generally dealing with so many immediate battles that it is hard for us to lift our gaze above the moment. It is a law of power, however, that the further and deeper we contemplate the future, the greater our capacity to shape it to our desires.” — Robert Greene
The more deeply and further out that you contemplate your future, the clearer you will get on your future self.
The more work you do that’s actually important to your future self, the more you put your future self into a phenomenally different position.
You can’t put yourself into a different position if you’re grinding away at the daily minutiae, caught up in the busy and urgent but non-important.
4. Having No Vision Or A 2x Vision
“The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.” — Bill Copeland
Most people don’t have clear goals. They don’t have a clear vision for their future self, and they don’t know where they are going.
If you don’t know where you are going, it doesn’t matter how you get there.
Most people’s vision of their future self is basically getting to the next paycheck or getting to the next weekend. They don’t have clarity on who their future self is, and they certainly don’t have a massive and compelling future self.
They don’t have what entrepreneur and founder of XPrize Peter Diamandis would call a Massive Transformative Purpose, or MTP.
“Your Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP) is a clear statement that guides, empowers, and inspires you. It helps you decide what to do, and more importantly what not to do. It’s both your fuel and your filter.” — Peter Diamandis
In 10x Is Easier Than 2x, Dan Sullivan and I explain the difference between a 10x vision and a 2x vision. With a 2x vision of your life, you’re using an extrapolation of your current situation to continue your future. It is a continuation, not a transformation. With a 10x vision, you have to change everything.
“10x is the equivalent of going from crawling to walking; from not knowing the alphabet to reading; from living in your parent’s basement to living on your own; from being awkward and shy to a bold and emotionally-intelligent leader. 10x is tantamount to going from horse and buggy to a car. You may be in the same genre — such as transportation — but you’re not comparing apples to apples. A non-linear change has taken place. It’s fundamentally a qualitative shift, more than a quantitative one. The transformation occurs by operating from a seemingly impossible and imagined future, and takes you in a non-linearly and radically different direction and approach than what you (and everyone else) have been doing to this point.” — Excerpt from 10x Is Easier Than 2x
Unfortunately, most people have a 2x vision, even though this is psychologically destructive. In psychology this is actually known as the “default” future. There’s a lot of research showing that because people have a 2x vision, they underestimate who their future self will be. Most 18-year-olds don’t think they’re going to transform that much, despite most older people being in a dramatically different situation than when they were 18. Because of the “end of history illusion” made popular by Dr. Daniel Gilbert, most people think who they’ve always been is who they’re always going to be.
Most people have a fragile identity. They’re not learning and transforming.
To upgrade your brain, you need to have a SEEMINGLY IMPOSSIBLE future self. Decide who you will become (remember, no more than 3 priorities).
You want this to be so high that it feels impossible to get there. When your future self is aligned with a 10x vision, your brain is forced to start operating at a faster and higher level. Your brain will be attracted to the right people, resources, places, and opportunities to dramatically advance towards your future self, and it will start working at a deeper and higher level. Your brain will start saying “NO” to things your previous self was dependent upon.
A 2x vision doesn’t require your brain to transform. This means your neural connections and pathways under 2x will largely remain the same, blocking your brain from growth. If your brain is not being required to create new connections towards new things, your brain is atrophying.
You want a 10x and seemingly impossible future, requiring you to let go of 80% of your current life.
10x is such a high bar and filter that only the best 20% of what you are doing right now really matters.
Find that 20% and go really deep. This is how you will get 10 times better at what you do.
You can get infinitely better, and your brain can become substantially faster, but it will require letting go of what got you here. You are not your past self. The only reason you’re holding onto most of your life right now is out of security and habit. Psychologically, we like things to be predictable and have assurance.
Your 80% is your security blanket.
In fact, in psychology there’s a name for this called “prospect theory,” which asserts that people would rather have a smaller reward with certainty rather than a larger reward with uncertainty.
“People tend to overweigh options that are certain, and are risk averse for gains. We would rather get an assured, lesser win than take the chance at winning more (but also risk possibly getting nothing). The opposite is true when dealing with certain losses: people engage in risk-seeking behavior to avoid a bigger loss.” — Aurora Harley
Most people create their vision from what they “need,” not what they want.
The challenge most people have as soon as they start becoming successful is that they’re no longer operating out of need, and they don’t know how to create a vision of what they want, because all they’ve ever done up until that point was from the perspective of need.
80% of the distractions in your life are held onto out of emotional security and out of habit.
Habits are actually destructive for your brain. Habits are the opposite of deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice is the art of having clear goals, and going through a training process that transforms yourself and your abilities around and towards those goals.
Because habits is a far more marketable and attractive subject, habits is the subject of the book title, but true deliberate practice is about getting 1% better each day whereas habits will get you 0% better each day.
The purpose of deliberate practice is to stop habitual rhythms and get better instead.
Deliberate practice is the pathway to fulfillment of your 10x vision. Impossible goals will you to stop operating from the habits of your past self.
Stop operating from the assumptions of your past self, and start finding new and unique pathways. Find the people and pathways to get where you’re trying to go.
You can choose the vision you’re looking for. You can choose the standard.
Most people have not trained their brains for imagination. Imagination is a skill. Because most people aren’t training their brains for it, they have actually lost the skill of imagination.
Journaling is a beautiful tool to help you fix this.
learning how to train your brain to get what you want is a skill.
Getting emotionally connected to your future self is a skill. Getting to a place of commitment and knowing is a skill.
“Faith knows it has already received and acts accordingly.” — Florence Shinn
Training your brain towards goals that seem impossible is a skill.
Go for impossible goals every 90 days. Every 90 days you can transform your life. You can train your brain and your team to start filtering for opportunities to change your life.
Your brain will transform based on what you give it.
5. Failing To Rest
“Rest and recovery are critical for an athlete’s physiological and psychological well-being” — Dr. Karin VanBaak
When I was in my PhD program, my wife and I adopted 3 foster kids. When we first got them, we were shocked at how much sleep they needed. They needed 10–11 hours of sleep every night.
If you study any high performer, rest and recovery are essential to their routine. Because their work is so deep, they need to spend time unplugging and resting.
If you want to transform your brain, give it deep recovery.
Forms of active recovery that are fun, beautiful, enjoyable, and playful will stimulate your brain into learning faster and performing much better when you are at work.
Most people have not trained their brains to be either fully on or off. They’re semi-present at work and never fully recovering.
You want to train your brain to be fully on when you’re working, and fully off when you’re not. This will also impact the quality of your sleep.
If you want really, really good focus, and really, really good sleep, put your phone on airplane mode at night. Completely unplug and go all-in on your rest and your recovery. To start transforming your brain, you’ll have to get your sleep to an optimal level.
Also, find hobbies outside of work. Be immersed in them. Have playful, fun, really enjoyable hobbies outside of work that you get passionate and excited about.
Recovery leads to deep transformation, novelty, and joy.
Recovery leads to a life of immersion, not a life at the surface.
6. Not Taking Time To Reflect
“Reflection is one of the most underused yet powerful tools for success.” — Richard Carlson
Most people don’t take time to reflect where they’re at.
Reflecting where you’re at is an essential component of deep and deliberate practice.
Review your last week. Review your last month. What GAINS did you make?
Observe, track, and report the things that are helping your brain move and go faster. According to Pearson’s law, what is measured and reported improves exponentially.
Take the last month and actually reflect and review on what you truly accomplished.
Take some time to look at the digital well-being section of your phone and of your social media apps.
How much time did you spend scrolling on your phone? How much time did you spend honestly reflecting and reviewing? How much did you actually accomplish?
Chances are you’ve accomplished some things this month that are really important that you didn’t even realize you accomplished.
Your time to reflect and review is deeply important. Your brain is a reconstruction machine. Your memories are not stored on a retrieval basis. Your memory actually reconstructs in light of the present context each time you remember and reflect on it. This is how you can proactively master your past and allow your future to dictate your present, by proactively shaping these experiences through review and reflection.
In Can’t Hurt Me, David Goggins teaches how to adopt the military practice of filing an After Action Report, or ARR, to review and proactively re-frame your personal experiences.
“Break out that journal…log off the digital version and write them out long-hand. I want you to feel this process because you are about to file your own belated, After Action Reports. First off, write out all the good things, everything that went well, from your failures. Be detailed and generous with yourself. A lot of good things will have happened. It’s rarely all bad. Then note how you handled your failure. Did it affect your life and your relationships. How so?” — David Goggins
He actually does what he teaches here when he falls short multiple times in beating the world record for most pull-ups done in 24 hours. He chose to re-frame these ‘failures’ as learning opportunities, which he then leveraged to successfully break the record later on.
Your memories are not stored in objective entities. They are always a living part of who we are in the present.
Your past is a reconstruction.
Memory is a reconstruction.
Memory can just as creative as your vision, when you are planning for your future.
When you reflect and review your progress regularly, your past turns into something VERY useful.
Even trauma can be useful to you if you are reflecting in the right way. Psychologically, this is known as post-traumatic growth.
Just like David Goggins’ pull-up experience, every circumstance can become a gain for you if you choose to learn something from it and choose to imbue value in the experience.
7. Not Engaging in Physical Activity
“[Aerobic exercise] lights a fire on every level of your brain, from stoking up the neurons’ metabolic furnaces to forging the very structures that transmit information from one synapse to the next.” — John J. Ratey and Eric Hagerman, from Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain
Cardio and weightlifting are so good for your brain. You want to train your body and your brain at the same time.
When you train your brain before mental work, your brain has a lot of endorphins running through it and your brain will be firing a lot faster.
To get into peak mental shape, get into peak physical shape.
If you want a brain that can solve amazing problems, fire neurons really fast, make new connections, and be super creative — you need to train up your body.
Get into peak physical shape, whatever that means for you.
This may mean getting a health coach. I have a health coach.
Eat better nutrition. Put whole foods into your body. Get your nutrition dialed in. Get blood tests and actually make adjustments.
You have to get your body running at a high level to support your brain. Weed out synthetic junk food and train your fitness to the highest level.
You can get your fitness to incredible levels. You can get into much more of an elite physical shape than you may think.
Getting your body to an amazing level is SO GOOD for your brain. Develop performance routines that enable this.
Above all, remember why you are doing this.
“…I don’t think you can do [the] five or six hours of working out a day — if you don’t have a clear goal or know why you’re doing it. If you just hang out at the gym and train for five or six hours a day without a goal, [doing that is] almost impossible.” — Arnold Schwarzenegger
Getting your fitness, strength, and stamina to a very high level will transfer over to having deep flow and focus in your mental work.
Conclusion
You can transform your body and your brain into peak physical levels and achieve the impossible.
Your brain wants to filter for things that you’re not seeing.
Your brain wants to start finding gold coins instead of the bronze coins that you’ve been chasing.
Your brain wants to develop unique skills, abilities, and connections, today.
Your brain will produce the results that you are the most committed to.
Ready To Upgrade?
Click here to get my latest book 10x Is Easier Than 2x on Kindle for FREE. (Available only in the US.)
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