Transcription
Our phones are rotting our brains. That's not an opinion at this point. There has been ample research showing how harmful our phones can be for our attention, for our critical thinking abilities. The good news is we can work our way around it. Let's unrot our brains.
So, the first step in unrotting your brain is to get curious. And some of us don't even know where to start. What are we even interested in anymore? So, what I want you to do is create a curiosity map. And it is just kind of a free-flowing brainstorm of the things that you want to know more about. And some questions you could ask yourself to get there is, what are the topics that you naturally click on without thinking? So documentaries that you will actually watch all the way through to the end or podcast episodes, articles or videos that you always watch and you find fascinating. Those are the type of topics and you just want to get them all in one place. This will give you inspiration. This will give you a starting point.
The next thing that I recommend you do is switch from short-form content to long-form content if nothing else. It is specifically the short-form content that acts as kind of a mental slot machine and the anticipation of what the next scroll will deliver you is what is really messing up the dopamine receptors in your brain. So even making that switch from TikTok to YouTube which look you're here now you're already taking the first step and then you can go the next level go to your curiosity map and start watching videos on those topics you're interested in. It's an easier transition from short-form content to long-form content on interesting topics than it is getting into, let's say, dense literature.
The next tip here is to create something for yourself that I call an analog bag. This is a bag you could grab and go without your phone and reexperience life again and stimulation without your phone nearby. So, I try and go outside with my analog bag at least 30 minutes to an hour a day. Leave the phone inside to put a book. I have some activities which I'll get into later. Some of my favorite activities.
The next thing I want you to pair learning with an activity. That is I think the easiest transition way to do it. For example, the documentary while you're doing something else, while you're moving your hand, because how we are now with our attention span being so short, it can be hard to sit down and even read a few pages. I get that. So, now I'm going to talk about what some of those hobbies are and activities cuz I have tried all the hobbies. My big one is watercolor painting. And I'll tell you why. It's portable. It's easy. And the way they have it now, they have these watercolor workbooks where there's already kind of a sketch. And with watercolor, it's free-flowing. I don't feel like I have to stay in the lines. I don't feel like I have to be a great artist. It's very forgiving. And what I've been doing lately is I bring it with me places. is I went and I had a spa day with my aunt the other day. I brought the watercolor. So instead of just sitting there talking, we were making art and sometimes your brain can be engaged in a different way when your hands are occupied. I took my kids, we went and watched the sunset one night and brought the watercolor supplies and we painted the sunset. Well, and take the pressure off yourself of I have to be good at this. It is not about being good. And frankly, anything in life that we're good at, you have to start by being bad at it first.
Also, the polymer clay. What I like about this is you can look at inspiration pictures, little polymer clay magnets. So satisfying. And then you have something tangible that you can use and look at and it just makes me happy. Look at my adorable homemade magnets. And then along those lines, this book my aunt brought for me and I've been doing it almost every day. and it teaches you how to draw, but in a really fun and whimsical way. And the instructions are very easy to follow, even if you have no artistic talent like me. And I feel like I'm really learning as well as having fun in the process. And there's a bunch of different things. It teaches you how to draw.
Next, a really popular one is adult coloring. I could never get into it and I couldn't quite figure out why. And I think it was just too time-consuming and I was getting the dopamine hit by finishing the coloring page but it was taking too long. So instead now what I do is this coloring book that has little coloring projects. I find it much more satisfying but it's also teaching you how to color and how to do shading and little techniques that empower you and just make it more satisfying to do. So if you've struggled with adult coloring, I recommend this coloring book. And then I still am really into the sticker puzzles. I don't like regular puzzles and I don't really like stickers. Something about this combination, you get in a flow state of putting down the stickers and when you get that perfect placement, it feels amazing.
Now for the next tip, I want to refer back to the biggest message of this entire video, which is that your brain will never want to do something with less dopamine. So if you are watching TikTok and then you try to transition to doing your work on your computer, that's less dopamine. So you're not going to want to do it. There's gonna be so much more resistance. So you can reset your dopamine by being bored and doing nothing. Being completely bored. Let your mind wander. You can meditate. That's going to reset your baseline dopamine. So then you can transition to something like reading or working.
Another thing I have talked about many times is my phone lock. If you just know you can't be trusted, all you have to do put your phone and this is a physical phone lock. You cannot open it, right? You can still access the alerts, but you're not going to be scrolling when it's in a lock box. Okay? It's like $19. Best $19 I ever spent cuz when I need to focus, when I need to lock in, I lock in. Now, you may think, "Oh, I can just do app blockers." You all know we're bypassing those app blockers. I actually deleted TikTok and Facebook from my phone and I will still sometimes access them on the weekend, but I have to redownload the app and sign myself back in. No one remembers their passwords anymore. So that extra step of friction makes it so that I only do that every so often and then Sunday night it's deleted.
Now we're going to go the next step up. If we really want these hobbies with benefits, not just unrotting our brain, I will challenge you to make a learning notebook. and it's so fun. So, basically, as I have my different topics that I'm learning about, researching, I know if I don't write this down, it's going in one ear, out the other, and I want to retain more of it. And then what you do is you find someone in your life who loves you enough, who wants to listen, and you explain it to them. My mom, she sat down, she listened, she was enthralled, she was engaged. And by taking something that you're learning about and explaining it to someone else, it helps you remember it and retain so much more. So yeah, and then it just kind of makes it more of a fun project and something more tangible and most importantly something more memorable.
Another thing you can do, I've been doing this now for years. I have a set time. Right now it's 9:00 p.m. I have an alarm on my phone. 9:00 p.m. My phone goes in the other room and then I have my reading time. there's nothing else competing for my attention. So then I usually read from 9 to 10:30 and it's amazing how much you can knock out when you have no other distractions. Another hot tip, what I like to do is I have a fiction and a non-fiction book going on at the same time. So a fun book and a more learning book. What I do now is I have 20 minutes a day where I have my LED light mask on. So as I sit there, I'm like, you know, laying there anyway, I read. I do one 10-minute session on my face and then one 10-minute session on my neck. And that is when I read my non-fiction because it takes more brain power. I don't want to be reading this before bed. And then before bed, that's when you could pick something that's more fun, adventurous, cool. And there is, despite what a lot of people say, there is so much benefit to reading fiction. No matter what it is, it is an active activity versus a passive activity. 10 minutes a day. That's all it takes to start to get in the habit of reading.
So, I will put all of the documentaries, the resources, all of the things I've discussed down in the description box because I am here to hopefully be a good influence on the internet, and also help us battle all of our demons, be smarter than the forces at play that are trying to make us dumber. Okay, so with all of that said, thank you so much for watching. Please subscribe if you are new here and you have not yet subscribed and I will see you soon with a new video. Bye.