Transcription
Hey guys, Mark here. So, I tried staring at a wall every single day for 30 days to see what would happen to my focus.
So, every day before I would enter my deep work zone where I need to do my most important disciplined work of the day, I would get in my chair, aim it directly at a wall. I wouldn't have my phone. I wouldn't have any food. I would barely have any sunlight in the room. It's just me and a wall.
But after completing this challenge, I can say that this is probably one of the highest leverage things that you can do to improve your focus. But first, let me answer the question why I actually did this. Because obviously it's to improve my focus. But why stare at a wall in the first place?
Well, the reality is most of the videos out there on YouTube right now fall into a category of what I like to call dopamine slop. And it's basically a bunch of people that are very uneducated about how dopamine actually works in your brain where they tell you to do things like do a dopamine detox, which in reality is not even a real thing. Even the guy that invented the term dopamine detox said that it was never meant to be used. Literally, it's physically impossible to detox a neurotransmitter from your brain.
So, most videos that I saw was either number one repackaged dopamine slop or just some kind of crazy hype video with David Gogggins on there telling you how you're not working hard enough and it's all a willpower issue. But that's the thing, most people don't actually have a discipline problem. What you actually probably have is a stimulation problem. And let me explain what I mean.
So, your brain is really good at learning just about anything. If you repeatedly do an activity, your brain is naturally going to get good at it through a process called myelination, which is where, as you can see here, when neurons are connecting, there are myelin sheets that are wrapping around them in order for the signal to travel faster, which just a fancy way of saying the more that you train your brain to exercise a specific stimuli, the better it's going to get at exercising that process. And again, there isn't really a problem inherently with the process of myelination in and of itself. The issue is what you are training your brain on.
Now the core mechanism surrounding why I came up with this idea in the first place is I knew that your brain is one big comparison machine. It doesn't necessarily assign objective value to anything. Everything is viewed in comparison to one another. For example, if the only stimulation that I ever gave my brain was doing deep work, going outside, and exercising, to my brain, that's all that it would know. In the same way that if all I did was scroll TikTok, order Door Dash, and play video games all day, that's all my brain would know then.
Because the problem is with most of you, the way that you work is before you go do your most important work, let's say you're studying, you know, for an exam and you have a bunch of stuff to do. If you're scrolling your phone and you have, you know, dopamine hit after dopamine hit after dopamine hit, that's the state that your brain is currently in. It doesn't have much to compare, at least in the short term, right before you get into your work. And so your actual deep work that you need to get done is so incredibly boring, so under stimulating. That's why it feels so challenging for you number one to get started and number two for you to actually complete the work you said you were going to do.
So, as I said in the intro, most dopamine content is completely misunderstood or at the very least misrepresented. So, the dopamineergic neurons in your brain have two very distinct uses and this is what most people don't really talk about. The first use is what's called phasic dopamine. This is the spike. This is your scrolling TikTok. This is your watching porn. This is your doing hard drugs. This is really what spikes your dopamine where most of the issues come from when it comes to hijacking your focus. It's fast, sharp, and it's typically tied to novelty. Like every time you're scrolling Instagram reels, every reel is new. Very rarely do you see the same two pieces of content within the same period of 5 to 10 minutes. And that's actually why social media is so addicting. It's because these unpredictable rewards are actually even more stimulating than something that is predictable, like the dopamine release that you get when you eat a highly satiating food.
The other use is called tonic dopamine. The exact opposite of phasic. Tonic dopamine is essentially your motivational floor. It's your brain's baseline readiness to expend energy towards a specific goal. It's not the spike. It's a setting. It's a baseline. Now, you can raise and lower that baseline, but nonetheless, it is a baseline.
Now, to explain this concept a little bit more, let me show you what, for example, scrolling TikTok doom scrolling does to these two types of activity when it comes to dopamine. So up on the top here we have your phasic activity as you can see aggressive spike and aggressive comedown and your tonic floor is going to be decreasing over time. You don't want your tonic floor to decrease. You actually want to see this steady if not increasing. The way to think about your tonic level is essentially your dopamineergic battery. So your phasic activity is like a notification that turns on your phone and just slightly drains the battery each time that you do it. And if you're just constantly lighting up your screen, of course, naturally, as you can see, your battery is going to go down. In fact, if we add in some more, you know, highly phasic dopamine spikes here, you can see just how much it's decreasing over time to the point where it's actually below the threshold that you need to make your deep work actually feel stimulating. And then you get to a point like this where your battery is basically empty. And it feels so damn difficult for you just to get started on something that it's actually somewhat difficult for your brain to execute.
And to be clear, the solution here is not a dopamine detox. We all know the people that detox anything typically just end up on the exact same path that they were before. I ultimately started to stare at a wall every single day to fix this problem because I knew that it wasn't going to be something that I just like cold turkey stop everything cuz I know I'm just going to relapse back into that, you know, the same activities that I was beforehand.
But if we look at something like staring at a wall, you can see just how drastically different it is. Both on the phasic activity, it's very steady and your tonic floor is incredibly high, which means you always have a high battery, which means actually doing your most important work feels easy. Not only that, but after you complete it, you genuinely feel good about yourself. You don't feel that like drudgy, you know, anti-motivational feeling where you just don't want to do anything and you kind of end up assigning a bunch of guilt to yourself and feel like a lazy piece of shit. None of that happens when you make this change.
And here's the few things that actually happened. Number one, it replaced all those super crazy spike phasic dopamine activities with tonic dopamine activity. So just imagine your brain is kind of like a backlog. I literally consider, you know, my brain sometimes almost like an LLM, like an AI tool. The most recent stuff is going to be your most well-remembered information. Like it's much harder to remember something from 10 years ago than it was 5 minutes ago, of course. And so I want to make sure that whatever comes right before my most important work should not be super high phasic activity. It should be tonic dopamineergic activity which hence is the reason that I stared at a wall.
Now number two, you actually get some really cool benefits outside of just being able to make work feel easier. For example, when you are doing something like staring at a wall, you actually activate an area in your brain called the DMN, which stands for the default mode network. So this is a network in your brain that activates when external stimulation drops. When you stop working, your brain just doesn't magically turn off. It's still working. It's just working in a different way. And there's typically lower levels of stimulation. But this is the time where your brain does really cool kind of like behind-the-scenes activity like internal thought, self-reflection, maybe like some detached problem solving. It's like if you ever spend time in solidarity, like no phone, no music, no stimulation. Do you ever realize that you just kind of start to reflect on your life and like question all your choices? That is the DMN in effect.
So, here's what happens when you actually do stare at a wall right before you do deep work for 30 days straight. Now, let me make something really clear. The goal here with staring at a wall is not to get into some super meditative state. Meditation is great. I think most people on the planet should be doing it. It's overall an incredible net positive. But the goal here, just to be clear, is to become less dependent on stimulation to begin something that's difficult. The actual problem for most people is that the gap between their stimulation baseline and what real work actually provides has gotten so wide that starting genuinely feels difficult.
Now, here's how you can actually do this yourself to get the maximum amount of results and don't end up staring at a wall for no freaking reason. First, I want you to commit to a minimum of 30 days. All right? Dopamine research shows that typically to make meaningful changes, you'll start seeing changes after the first week, but really it'll take a few weeks to reset your system, if that makes sense. And more importantly reset your contrast of what is actually stimulating.
Next, 20 minutes a day. Don't do it first thing in the morning unless you literally wake up and get immediately to work. You want to do it right before your most important deep work session, which leads into rule number three, which is make sure it's a high internal processing task. So whether that's writing, studying, problem solving, whatever time that you spend actually like creating and using your brain actively is when you should use this strategy.
Now, just to set your expectations, this is going to suck at first. It's going to feel incredibly boring. It's going to be incredibly uncomfortable, but discomfort is the signal that this is actually working. All right, we all know focus is a game of subtraction, not addition. So, what we're doing is subtracting unnecessary stimulation so that real work feels incredibly stimulating.
Now, the final piece here, it's not necessarily related to staring at a wall, but it's very, very important if you want this to work continuously. Most people after they complete their, you know, their work in general, what do they do? They get up from their desk or they walk out of the room and they go right on their phone. That ruins a lot of the work that you just did, a lot of the hard work, right? This is what I call a fake break. Fake breaks are not rest. It's just stimulation in another form. Like scrolling is not rest. Texting is not rest. YouTube is not rest. Those are just new forms of input, new forms of stimulation. And your brain is still processing. It's still reacting. It's still running the Q response loop. The only thing that changed is the content.
So, in order to fully complete the loop and actually make this like a habit that sticks and make your next deep work session even easier, you have to close that habit loop. Not by getting on your phone, but by doing something that releases dopamine slowly and over time. For example, going on a walk, eating healthy, like doing something that's not going to immediately spike your dopamine. I think you know what is and isn't going to be doing that for the most part.
Now, if you liked what I'm talking about in this video, this is like one tiny piece of a much larger video that I put together on my entire focus protocol. If you want to check out that video, I will leave it linked somewhere around the screen. Other than that, guys, thank you so much for watching. I'll see you on the next one. Peace. >> [snorts]