Transcripts
1. Welcome to the course!: Hello and welcome to the course. I'm Jeremy liquids, fixing your relationship with
technology and in particular your
devices is one of the most impactful things you can do for your performance, your success, and just your
overall well-being in life. So I'm glad that you've signed up and I'm excited
to get started. Our devices are such
an inherent part of how we function
in the world today. I hope you see what
a gift it is to yourself to take the time and intentionally decide how to be in relationship
with technology. Before we dive into
the course content, I want to take a
few moments to just talk about who this course is for to make sure you know that you're
in the right place. You might be struggling
with things like scattered attention or feeling like you're always distracted. You might feel like
your relationship to technology has gotten
out of control. Maybe you're on autopilot. You're not really choosing
how to use your devices, they're choosing how to use you. You might also be
feeling like you're wasting a lot of time on meaningless or
empty pursuits. Perhaps you're feeling
overwhelmed by technology. And this feeling of always being connected are constantly
on and engaged. And you don't know how to disconnect and actually
rejuvenate and rest yourself. You might also be noticing
the ways that things like social media are affecting
your well-being. Maybe there's a constant sense of comparing yourself to others, comparing your insides to
other people's outsides. You might also be
realizing that you are procrastinating on
what's really important. Maybe putting off your goals, putting off the projects, because you keep
getting sucked into distraction, temptation,
and avoidance. Ultimately, my guess is
that you're here because you just want to improve
the quality of your life. You want to be the
best version of yourself so that you
can show up for others. You can do meaningful work in the world if any of that
resonates with you, you know, you're in
the right place. Just a brief overview
of what to expect. There are four
different modules. The first module is
all about envisioning, connecting with an ideal
vision of the future. Second module is all about
building a strong foundation, particularly of mindset and different mental qualities
or inner strength qualities. Module three is all about habits, routines,
and discipline. How do we activate our
habits in a way that is sustainable and really builds those into our lives
so that we nail them. Module for the final
module is all about breaking through to a more fulfilling
and satisfying life, creating that life that doesn't need addiction
or distraction. What it is that all about? So those are the four
modules that we're gonna be going through
in this course. As a side note on this, if there's anything
that you're watching in the course and it feels like
it doesn't apply to you. Let's say I'm talking
about **** addiction. And you're really here because
you're addicted to e-mail. Feel free to skip it. Feel free to ignore it
or just throw it out. The key to all of this is, I will be offering you a set of tools and your task is to find the tools that
feel relevant that work for you and then
apply those to your life. If one thing doesn't make
sense or if you just don't resonate with it,
that's totally fine. Feel free to feel
free to skip it, move over it, throw it out. Whatever works for you, though on that note, I will say that at
the core level, at the root level, all of
these addictive behaviors and these compulsive behaviors are the same at the root level. What's true for
pointing addiction is gonna be true for
social media addiction. It's going to be true for Instagram addiction
and e-mail and news. All these kind of
compulsive tendencies have the same core
neurological basis. They're gonna be small
differences here and there. But it really does. It really is true that
what applies to one, we'll apply it to the
other to a large extent. I hope that's helpful on how
to go through the course.
2. Helpful tips for breaking old habits: Before we dive into the course content,
the course modules, I want to do one final lecture on just some helpful pointers, some helpful tips and advice
as we go through the course. One thing to keep in mind
is just to know that there is no right
or wrong approach. There is no one size fits
all approach to recovery. Some people need
a little more of this or a little more of that. The task for you
is just to figure out which of these things that I'm offering applies to you, which is helpful and which do you want to implement
into your life? The next helpful piece of advice is to be
patient with yourself. The habits and behaviors that we're gonna be working
with in this course would likely built up over years or even decades or maybe
even your whole lifetime. So as long as it took for those habits to be
built-in, you know, it takes time for them to be unbuilt or two that for
them to be removed, to be patient with the process, to realize this is
a messy process. We live messy lives
as human beings. And it's not gonna be a perfect linear path
from point a to point B. It's going to be more of
this kind of up and down. You might have some
progress and then you slide back a little bit in some progress and
you slide back. What we want to focus on is the general trend
of improvement. One thing that I like to
say is to prepare for a long journey and learn how
to love the journey itself, rather than focusing on the
outcome or the destination. If you can love the journey, then it doesn't
matter how long it takes for you to get there. It's going to be a better life. One of the most
important qualities you can cultivate when it comes to habits and
behaviors is consistency. Just keep showing
up for yourself. There's gonna be times where
you feel like giving up, times where you feel like you've had enough or
you've done all you can, but just keep showing
up day after day. That's the most
important thing you do, and it's just a great gift
that you're giving to yourself to
continually come back, look at yourself in the mirror, see what you need to
improve and move forward. And finally, my
last little bit of advice is to be
gentle with yourself, to be kind to yourself
in this process. You are going to mess up. You are going to
slip up sometimes. And to just know
that it's okay to be gentle and not beat
yourself up so much. But just do your best. Treat yourself like you
would your best friend, and keep showing up. So those are my
helpful pointers. Before we move on. Now that we've covered
all the basics in the introduction, you can head on over to the first module where
we're going to talk about envisioning
a greater future. I'll see you in the next module.
3. 1.1 - Envisioning Intro: So where do we begin? Well, I love this quote
from Stephen Covey, who says Begin with
the end in mind. One of the most powerful
things that you can do for changing habits, for creating a rich, beautiful, and powerful life is to shift your attention
towards the future. There's some interesting
research that shows that the most successful people are the ones who think about
where they're headed. They have that long-term vision. They think about where
they're going to end up in the next five years, in the next ten years
or the next 20 years, they have that connection
to their future self. So rather than just focusing on the short-term gains or
short term pleasure, they focus on those
longer-term goals, their visions and aspirations. So the very first
thing we need to do when it comes
to breaking out of some of our old
conditioned habits is to start connecting with that vision of the future is to start shifting our orientation, shifting our attention
to start viewing. Where are we headed
in my own life, many of you know that
I struggled with **** addiction
from an early age, starting somewhere around
eight or nine years old. I don't remember the
exact age I was, but I remember getting
into it very early. And it was something
that I lived with for most of my life. And slowly over time, they built up a stronger and
stronger dependency on it. By the time I got to the
end of my college years, I was watching two
to three hours of **** every single night
and I tried to quit. I couldn't really stick with it. I would try deleting my files or deleting my bookmarks
are hiding my computer. I tried a bunch of
different things but none of it worked. I kept slipping back into
the same old habits, the same old routines
again and again. But there was a single moment where everything's
shifted for me. I remember I was walking
down the street in Davis, California and there were these two beautiful women
walking in front of me. I remember being filled with
just **** and desire and craving and my old compulsive
self started to kick in. And it was this big
black sinking pit in my chest of feeling
like I didn't have enough, like I wanted more. And I remember this
moment where I had this vision of myself
50 years down the road. I saw myself as some 70 or 80 year-old man who was still doing
the same things. You know, like some
creepy pervert hanging out at college bar is
trying to pick up on women. I had that vision of myself. Something about that
vision woke me up. It helped me realize that
if I didn't make a change, if I didn't do
something drastic, That's where I was headed. That really shook me. And at that same
time, I also started to reflect on what did I want, what did I want to get to? I started seeing what was
actually important to me and connecting with
what was important to me. I realized that what
I wanted was to be living a deep life, a life of deep contentment, deep relationships, deep
connection with other people. I want it to be traveling
the world and pursuing my dreams and my goals
and aspirations. What I did in that
moment without realizing the name of
it back then was what I now know as envisioning this ability to connect with a vision of something
that hasn't happened yet, a vision of the future
of what's to come. And it was connecting with
that long-term vision, both the good and the bad, that finally gave me that internal drive that I
needed in order to break free. It's what gave me that
internal motivation, the thing that drove me to
finally change my habits. Now this work of envisioning
is really important because without connecting to that compelling
vision of the future, without getting clear
on where you're headed. If you don't make a change, you're going to be
more subject to the vagaries of your
day to day life. Just how you're feeling
on a given day. Whether you're feeling
motivated or unmotivated, whether you're feeling lazy, you're feeling stressed
or like procrastinating. And the thing is, that's
the last thing we want. We don't want to be subject to those day to day things like hunger or stress or
just being tired. We want to be in
control, unflappable, unmovable, where we're
really driving forward, we're steering the ship forward. With that in mind in
the next two sections, we're gonna be covering
the first two aspects of this envisioning process. First, we're gonna be looking
at the default future. And then we'll start creating a more compelling vision of
where we want to get to. So when you're ready to
dive into those practices, go ahead and join me in the next video.
I'll see you there.
4. 1.2 - Seeing the Default Future: Welcome. This first part of the envisioning exercise is called Seeing the
default future. It's about getting
really clear on where you are or could be headed. If you don't make a change, if you continue living
as you are now, where are you headed? Where are you going to end up? This is the practice of
seeing the default future. In order to do this practice, I'm going to ask you to do some journaling as we
go through this video. And I really want you to
actually do the journaling. If you just sit
there and think, Oh, I know the answers
to this already, or I'm just going
to think about it. That's not going to cut it. If you actually have to take the time and dive
into each question. So really grab a pen and paper, grab something to write
on or write width, and actually do these exercises. If not, you're just
wasting your own time. Now as a side note to this, you might want to
do some of these as a free flow journaling exercise. What that means is once
I tell you the prompt, what you can do is
set a short timer, maybe three minutes
or five minutes. And just keep depend moving. Let your thoughts flow onto
the paper and don't stop. If you run out of
things to right? You can just write. I'm not sure what to write, I'm not sure what to write
until something else comes. The alternative to
that is just to answer it in depth as best you can, but no need to set anytime. All right, so here's your
first journaling exercise. What habits or behaviors are
holding you back in life? Now for this, I want you to really think
about everything. Really just do a brain dump, get it all on paper, write down everything
you can think of. That feels like it's holding
you back in some way. So it might be it might be
checking email too much. It might be eating junk
food late at night. Just get everything
out on the paper. So now pause this video
and start writing. Alright, Did you do it? Again? If you didn't
do it, go back, pause the video,
and start writing down all these habits and behaviors that are
holding you back. Alright, the next
journaling prompt is this. What beliefs, behaviors, or pursuits are no
longer serving you? What beliefs, behaviors or pursuits no longer serving you? This is similar to the last one, but it's really
thinking about things that may be did serve
you in the past, that were compelling
for you in the past, but no longer serve you. Go ahead and pause this video. Take the time to
answer this question. Alright, I hope you've
taken the time to be really thoughtful about these
first two questions. You can spend hours and hours
on personal development, on improving your life. But if you're focused
on the wrong areas, you're not gonna get very far. So we really want to take
the time to figure out first what's not
working in our life. What are the real
specific things that are holding us back? I hope you've taken the time to dive into these questions. Now take a moment and look through everything
that you wrote. And I want you to pick one
single specific behavior to work with going forward. Don't worry about
picking the right one. We're getting this perfect. Just pick one that feels
like it's the most pressing, it's the most, it's
holding you back the most. In some way. We're going to
go forward with that one. But just know you can
always go back and do these exercises again with any of the other
habits and behaviors. You might choose something
like dating apps, or it might just be
social media in general. Whatever it is, pick one
specific thing that's really causing you a lot of trouble and we're going to
move forward with that one. All right, Now we're going
to dive deeper into how this habit or behavior is
affecting our present. The next journaling
prompt is this. In what ways is
this habit holding me back in my professional
life or my career pursuits? In what ways is this
habit holding me back in my professional life
or my career pursuits? Pause the video and
answer this one. All right, the next question, in what ways is this
habit negatively affecting my romantic
life or my relationships? What ways is this habit
negatively affecting my romantic life or
my relationships? Take the time and
answer this one. Alright, now the final question. In what ways is this
habit negatively affecting my general
health and well-being? In what ways is this habit negatively affecting my
general health and well-being? Go ahead and take the time and write down everything
you can think of. Now here's where we dive
into the default future. The next question I'm going
to ask you to write about dives into what might
happen as a result. The prompt for this one is this. If things continue this way
or if things get worse, what could I lose as a result? If this behavior continues? What might I lose in my life? What might happen in
my life as a result? Really get playful
with this one. Exaggerated a little bit. All right, Take the
time for this question. All right, The final
reflection question for this exercise, thinking five years down the road or ten
years down the road, what is your greatest
fear around what might happen if you don't
fix this issue? What is your greatest
fear around this issue? If you aren't able to
make a change and if things really get worse, here, really think about what is
the worst-case scenario, what something really bad
that could actually happen? What do your version of
becoming up perverted old man? So pause the video and
answer this final question. All right, congratulations. You might not feel like celebrating after
doing this exercise, but it is a necessary first
step on the path to freedom. I hope that you feel it least positive that you're making progress in the right direction. We now have a helpful
reference point to compare to the next
exercise we're gonna do, which is diving into creating a compelling
vision of the future. Where do we want to go? When you're ready for that, I'll see you in the next video.
5. 1.3 - Creating a Compelling Vision of the Future: So the second part of
this envisioning exercise is to get really clear on
what's called the dream future. Where do you want
to go in your life? You could have it your own way. How would you be living in what would be
present in your life? If there's one thing that I can help you accomplish
in this course, it would be really connecting on an emotional level with
that vision of the future. Something that excites
you and inspires you and gets you motivated to get out of the bed each morning. That's what we're going
to be diving into in this next exercise. In particular, we're
going to be looking at the inner world
of art dream future, not just the material
things that we want, like a big house
or lots of money. But how do we want to
feel in this future? Are we feeling fulfilled and like we're living
a life of purpose? Do we feel connected to others? How are our relationships and the quality of the time we
spend with other people? And really, what are we
feeling in this future? Are we feeling content
are happy and joyful. Keep that in mind as we go
through these exercise, focus on the feelings
of this future. Before we begin, a quote
from Michelangelo, he says, The danger for most
of us lies not in setting our aim too
high and falling short, but in setting our aim too
low and achieving our mark. What we can see here
is that many of us fail because we
don't aim high enough. And in fact, what we
do is that we set our aim too low and
we achieve that mark. We settle for a life
of just met, you know, kind of going through
the motions in life, being happy but not
really satisfied. I want to encourage you to
think big in this exercise, to let go of any limiting
belief that go of any questioning about
whether this life that you're dreaming
up is possible. But just have fun. If you could make
anything come true. If it were really up to you, how would you be
living your life? The point of this
exercise is to connect with a compelling
vision of the future. You'll know that you've
hit the mark when you feel that kind of inner
fire come alive, when you feel that
inner spark of all, yes, this is what I want. This is inspiring to
me, this is activating. That's how you'll know
that you're touching on something important for you. The first practice we'll do in this envisioning exercise of the dream future is something called the airport exercise. What I want you to imagine and feel free to close your
eyes for this if you like. Imagine that five
years from now, you're at an airport waiting to board a flight and you hear on the overhead
announcements system that the flight has been
delayed by two hours. Just as you hear
this announcement, you see an old
friend of yours from high-school who you haven't
seen in a long time. It was someone that you used
to be really close with. And he's waiting for
the same flight as you. And you decide to go get a cup of coffee as you guys
wait to board this flight. As you go and get your coffee, you sit down and he turns
to you and he says, How have you been, how has
life been treating you? And you say to him, You say, life is beyond my
wildest dreams. I could not have imagined it any better than it is right now. I'm deeply fulfill
them inspired, I'm living my best
life possible. Now the question for you is, what is going on
in your life where you can say this to
this old friend. What are the things
that are happening in your life five years from now, where you can truly, genuinely say this is the best I could ever
imagine it being. Now what I want
you to do is write down what do you see
in this future life. Imagine yourself
five years from now, beyond your wildest dreams. And take the time
to write this out, write down everything
you can think of. What are you doing for
work, where you living? How are your relationships? Are you in a relationship
or not in relationship? Do you have a family
and do you have kids? Also get really clear on things
like your daily routines. What do you do in the morning? What do you do in the afternoon? What do you eat on
a regular basis? How does your body feel? Then finally, also
get really clear on how are you feeling
in this future. As you do this exercise, I want you to write
from the present tense, five years from now. So instead of writing
in five years, I will be doing this
or living here. Write it from that
present tense. I live here. I do this for work. I spend my mornings
doing delta time. Really take the
time for this one. Have fun with it. Map out that dream
vision of your life. You're going to want to spend at least five minutes on this, maybe even ten or 15
minutes or longer. When you're ready,
pause this video, map it out five years from now, your best life possible. Write down everything
you can think of. All right, Congratulations. I hope that was an invigorating and activating
experience for you. It might have also been
difficult for some people tapping into this sense of
what I really want is hard. And the truth is, that's a muscle that we
have to cultivate connecting with that
vision of what's possible, whether it was easy
for you or difficult. Don't worry, just know
that the more you do this practice of connecting
with what you truly want, the easier it will get. All right, I have a
couple more journaling prompts that I want you
to spend some time with. So here's the next prompt. What does success
look like for me? How do I define
success in my life? So take some time for this, pause this video and go ahead
and answer the question. All right, then the final
journaling prompt for this, at the end of the day, what is really important to me? At the end of the day? What is really important to me? Pause this video, take
some time for that, and we'll see you back
here in a second. All right, congratulations on moving through this exercise of envisioning
your ideal future, a compelling vision
of the future. Know that it won't be
perfect on the first try, you can come back
to these exercises as often as you need to. But it's about
cultivating this muscle of connecting with
where do I want to go? What's important to me? How do I want to be living? Also understand that
these visions and aspirations will
change over time. They're not going
to be set in stone. So what you just wrote down, It's not the final answer. It's just how you're
currently feeling today. Having that flexibility of
knowing these things will morph and change and
evolve over time is fine. Just a quick note before we move forward on staying motivated. Often people find it's
helpful to create something called a vision
board for their dream future. If you've never done a vision
board, it's very simple. In any way, creating a visual representation
of this dream future. What you can do is find different pictures or
images on the Internet and bring them together into either a gallery or a collage. Something to remind yourself of what this dream future
looks like for you. You can print that out
and put it on your wall. You can have it as a bookmark to check in with every morning. It's really up to you
some way of connecting to that vision that
you've just created. In the next video, we're
gonna start looking at, at our value systems,
our core values. We're going to learn
how to get unclear on our guiding principles. This is another important aspect of creating that compelling
vision of the future. How do we want to
show up in the world? When you're ready, I'll
see you in the next video.
6. 1.4 - Values Identifier: Chances are you are hearing
this course because you realize that a
lot of your time and energy going into
unfulfilling or meaningless activities
and pursuits that you are not living in a
deeply meaningful way. Maybe it's indulging too
much in procrastination, wasting your time or escaping
your responsibilities. Or maybe it's just
being on autopilot, not really in control
of what you're doing, whatever it is that
brought you here. If you want to live in deeply meaningful
and fulfilling life, you've got to take the time
to figure out what are the qualities of a good life? What are the values that
are important to you? Many people go through
life never taking the time to discover
what their values are. This is a big problem
because if you're not being intentional about
what your values are, there's a good
likelihood that you are living someone
else's value system, that you are unconsciously adopting other people's
values or beliefs. For example, some people, and you probably
know a few of them, are entirely motivated by
fame and success and fortune. Wanting more
external validation, more approval from other people, or maybe wanting
just more money. And this is not
because any of us have sat down and
intentionally thought, Oh, I really value other
people's opinions of me. Or I really value having as much mouth pleasure
as I can in my life. It's because we've subconsciously
adopted these values. It's because the way
society is built and the way our cultures evolve. It has been steering us
in these directions, often on a subconscious level. It's not only what
we see in the movies and through our
society and culture, It's also tens of thousands or hundreds of
thousands of years of biological evolution that drive us in particular directions. This drive towards sense
pleasure often comes from that physiological need for
things that tastes good, things that feel
good in the body. The problem is that many of these biological systems get
hijacked by our society. They get taken over and are in an unhealthy level,
their out-of-control. If you want to live a life of deep fulfillment and living
with more integrity, you have to do the work to first uncover what are your values, not what our society's values. What are other people's values, but what are the values
that really drive you? What makes a good life for you? Now we're going to dive into a few journaling
practices to help you uncover and crystallize what are the value systems that
you hold in high regard? So go ahead and grab
that pen and paper, grab a journal and
get ready for it. The journaling exercises. All right, this first
journaling prompt is to pick out five people who you admire. These can be people you know, personally, family or
friends or relatives. Or they can be
historical figures or public figures, politicians,
religious leaders. They can also be
fictional characters. If you have a favorite TV
show or a favorite movie, there's a fictional
character who you really admire and
that's alright too. I want you to pick out five
people who you really admire. And then for each
person to write out what are the traits that
you admire in this person. For each person, see
if you can get to at least five different
traits that you admire. All right, go ahead
and pause this video. Take the time to do this one. All right, so now
you should have a nice solid list of a
few different traits. We're gonna keep doing a
few other exercises to uncover some more values that you might hold
in high regard. This next exercise is this. I want you to journal
about how would you like to be remembered
when you're gone? How do you want
people to remember you after you've passed away? It takes some time, maybe
do a free flow journaling, maybe three minutes or
five minutes on this one. How would I like to be
remembered when I'm gone? Take some time and
work on this one. All right, This next exercise
is a two-part exercise. I'm gonna explain
the first part. Then you're gonna do
that and then I'll explain what comes next. So first what I want you to
do is I want you to create a list of five different
things that really annoy you. You know, what really
gets under your skin, what irritates the
crap out of you? So go ahead and
pause this video, write down five things that really irritate
you or annoy you. Alright? So now that you have those
five things that irritate you, what I want you to
do is take each of those things and
find the opposite. What is the value that, that is in opposition to? For example, one of
the things that really irritates me is when people are making lot of noise or
disturbances in public spaces. And the value for me in that, the thing that's
an opposition is respecting other people's space, respecting other people's
desire to be peaceful. It's being considerate
of others is the value that I hold
in opposition to that. Go ahead and take some time. Pause this video. What are the opposites of
these things that annoy you? Alright, so now we've
done a bit of work on digging deeper
and uncovering some of the things that we hold in high regard from all of
these journaling practices. What I'd like you to do is to read through what you
wrote and then see if you can come
up with a list of five of your core values. What are the five most
important things? It's totally fine to come
up with values, strings. So these are things
that are similar. You might lump them
together as a single value. So for example, if
I value respect and nonviolence and creating
safety for others, that might be a single string of values that I
can put into one. Go ahead and take
the time saving, come up with a list of your five core values
or core values strings. Pause this video
and do this work. All right, Great job. Now you should have a list
of some of your core values. Just a little note on this. Don't worry too much about whether or not you've
picked the right ones. Whether these are the best
values or even whether or not these are your five
most important ones. To know that this is
an iterative process. You're going to be doing
this over your life, re-evaluating what's
important to you. It's fine that you just have a kind of a rough
draft right now, something to get you started to look back on
what's important.
7. 1.5 - Getting into Alignment: Now it's one thing
to know your values, and it's another
thing to actually be aligned with your values
or embodying your values. For example, I
might really value deep work or focused life. What I might spend
most of my time mindlessly scrolling
on Instagram or habitually compulsively
checking news sites or e-mail. Maybe I value treating
my body well, living a healthy lifestyle, but I keep eating junk food and treating
my body like crap. Or maybe my values are
around nonviolence and safety and respect
for other people. But I'm watching **** that is denigrating or maybe even
harmful towards women. This is about checking
in with yourself and seeing where are you out of
alignment with your values. So go ahead and
grab your journal. The next journaling prompt
to dive into this Is this, where am I out of
alignment with my values? Where do I feel out of integrity with the
values I listed before? Take a few minutes
to reflect on this. Finally, one of the
ways we can get more in alignment with our values is figuring out how do
we get back on track? Where do we want to shift
our attention towards? For this next journaling prompt, I'd like you to reflect on this. What is one value
that I would like to bring more into my life? And what are some opportunities to bring this value
into my life? So pause the video, reflect on this one. Alright, great work. We've just done a lot of
work of uncovering what are the values that we
hold in high regard where we out of alignment
with those values. And where do we want to
be bringing more energy to which values do we want
to bring more into our life? The way I see it? Values are like lampposts on
a journey through darkness. We might be fumbling around, not really sure which
direction to go. And we see these lampposts, these lights guiding us
in the right direction. This is a great way
to view our values. They can help us make
decisions when we're at a crossroads or when we come
upon a difficult situation, we're not sure what to do. They can help us figure
out suitable way forward. In the next video, we're
gonna get more concrete. We're gonna look at another
important aspect of transformation and
getting unhooked. This is about setting
appropriate and motivating goals for ourselves. When you're ready, I'll
see you in the next video.
8. 1.6 - Goal Setting 101: Welcome to goal-setting 101. Goal-setting is helpful in habit change because
it harnesses that aspect of our
human psychology that wants to achieve things that
wants to check-off boxes, that likes to accomplish. It can help us get unstuck
and help us move forward. We're going to look at what are the basics of goal-setting. And we're going to take
some time to figure out some appropriate motivating, aspirational goals
for ourselves. First, a quick recap
of smart goals. This is something that you might have heard about when you were a young child or a kid in high school or maybe in college, we're gonna look at
what our smart goals so that we can develop the
goals for ourselves. So the S stands for Specific. This means creating
a goal where it's easy to know whether or
not you've completed it. In the words of Cal Newport, it should have clear
criteria for completion. So an example would
be instead of saying I want to be
able to focus more, you might say something like, I want to spend two hours doing deep work every morning
before I check my phone. The idea is to create
a goal that is so specific that a toddler or a teenager could understand
exactly what you're talking about and know exactly when you have
accomplished it. The M stands for measurable. So this should be obvious to
you if you can measure it, it's much easier to track
your progress on it. For example, instead of saying I want to be a better runner, you might say I want to run
a 5k in under 25 minutes. Or you might say something like, I want to meditate for ten
minutes every morning. Instead of just saying I want to meditate in the
mornings more often. The a stands for achievable. While I do want to encourage you to dream big in your life. To think large. It's also important to create goals for yourself
that you know, are at least in the
realm of possibility, that they are achievable. For example, I might not say I want to join the NBA next month. In contrast to
that, I could say, I want to find a pickup
basketball league and find a way to play at
least one game once a week. The R stands for relevant, and this is super important. Finding a goal that is connected to that long-term
vision of the future. Why are you focused
on this goal? This should actually be
at the very beginning. Is this something that's
important to you? Is it moving you towards that vision of the future
that you have for yourself? So for example, in the last explanation that I
talked about joining the MBA, that's not relevant
for me because I don't like playing basketball. I might not choose
that as a goal. But what is important
to me is to be doing deep work every day
to spend time focusing, diving deep into work like writing and reading
and creating. I might create a goal
around my ability to do deep work that R
stands for relevant. Is it relevant to your
long-term aspirations? And T, the final letter in the smart acronym
stands for timed. And this is where it's
important to give yourself a deadline
or a timeline. There's so much research around the benefits of having a deadline for setting
yourself a goal. If you just say,
I want to do this by some time in the future, it's not as compelling. It's not going to lock
into that psychology as much as if you give yourself
a timeline or a deadline. So for example, in
this very course that I'm creating for you, I gave myself a deadline. And that deadline is
allowing me to giving me that fuel that I need to make progress rather than slipping
into procrastination. For whatever goal you have, it's helpful to slap on a
timeline at the end of it. Quick note on this,
it's helpful to sit positive or approach
oriented goals rather than negative or
avoidance based goals. Rather than saying, I
want to avoid ****, you might say, I want to spend more quality time
without the phone. That's an example
is helpful too. Set it in those positive
terms, that positive light, what is the thing you
want to be doing more of rather than the thing you
want to be doing less of. Of course, you won't
always be able to figure out an approach goal. There might be some
times where it is really important or
relevant to have that, that negative goal, the avoidance goal,
myths totally fine.
9. 1.7 - Creating a 90-day Goal: Alright, so now
that we've covered the basics of goal-setting, we're going to do some work, some journaling,
some exploration to help you figure out
what our goals for you. Now this practice, it's going to be a bit of journaling
and it's going to help you figure
out what would you like to focus on
in the coming months. Now this next exercise
we're going to do is the 30-second
goal planner. Now research has found
that if you're given thirty-seconds to
map out your goals, you'll come up with
roughly the same goals as you would if you're given
much longer than that, let's say ten minutes
or 30 minutes. So we're gonna give
you just 30 seconds for each of these prompts. So go ahead and grab your
pen and paper and get ready for this 30-second
firing of goal planning. Just write out whatever
comes to mind. Don't overthink it. Don't worry about creating a
super smart goals on these, but just get the basic ones out. In the next 30 seconds, I would like you to
write out what are your top three physical
health and fitness goals? Go ahead and take
the time for that. All right. Time's Up. Next one. What are your top three
professional and career goals? All right. Time's
up. The next one. What are your top three
relationship or community goals? Time's up on that one. Next one, what are
your top three? Hobby or fun or enjoyment goals? All right, Time's up. And then the last one, what are your top three overall
goals in life right now? That is the 30-second
goal planner, just a way of getting some
ideas out onto the page. A way of starting this
brainstorming process around what might be some
appropriate goals from me. You can take any of
those and turn them into more fully developed
smart goals later on. But now we're gonna shift into another goal planning exercise, another way of discovering what might be some
good goals for us. Once again, grabbing
your journal and a pen, and I'm going to ask
you some questions. All right, This next one is called the three by four method. What it is, is
you're going to do some planning around different
timelines in your life. So what I'd like you
to do next is to think about what would you like to accomplish in your life
in the next three years? Pause this video, take the
time to think about this. What would you like to accomplish in the next
three years if you could really accomplish anything you wanted with something that
is achievable and relevant, what would you accomplish
in the next three years? So pause this video and take the time to think
about this one. Alright, the next
part of this is, what would you
like to accomplish in the next three months? Given what you wrote before, what would you like
to accomplish in the next three
months or 90 days? Pause this video and take
the time to answer this. All right, great job. The next one, I hope you can
see where this is going. What would you like
to accomplish in the next three weeks? In the next three weeks, what do you hope to accomplish? Go ahead and pause this
video and answer this. Then the final one,
you've guessed it, what would you like to accomplish
in the next three days? What would you like to
accomplish three days from now? What is one thing that you
would like to accomplish? So take the time to answer this one and I'll see
you back in a second. All right, so now you have some ideas around
how to set goals, how to discover some goals that might be
appropriate for you. What I'd like you
to do is just pick one thing to focus on for
the rest of this course. That timeframe of
three months or 90 days is a great
timeframe to focus on. Before you finish this exercise, before you move on
to the next one, come up with one
thing that you'd like to accomplish in
those next 90 days. What is one thing that if
you could accomplish it, you would really feel like
you're moving forward in life. What does that 90-day
goal where you could say, if I can do this, it will feel like I've made
genuine progress in my life. Come up with that 190 day goal and we're going to stick
with that for awhile. Alright, that wraps it up for our basics of goal-setting 101. By now, what you've
done is a few things. You've spent some time diving
into your default future. Where are you headed if
you don't make a change? We've also looked at
establishing or creating that compelling vision
of the dream future. What do you want to get to? What's really important to you? Where is that shining
light in the future? We've also spent some
time getting clear on our values and
figuring out where we're out of alignment
with our values and where do we want to be more
in alignment with our values? Then in this video,
this lecture, we've looked at goal-setting and decided on some
goals to focus on. The next video
we're going to look at taking ownership
of your life. How do you take full
responsibility for your life? When you are ready for that? Go ahead and click on the next video and I'll see you there.
10. 1.8 - Taking Ownership: Before we move forward
into the next module, we have to cover
one final topic, and this is the
topic of ownership. The essential idea of
ownership is this. No one is going
to come save you. You have to do the
work yourself. When I realized that I had a problem with point addiction, I came to the realization
that nobody was gonna come save me or fix
the problem for me, that if I wanted
to change my life, I really had to take action. If I didn't take action, if I didn't take ownership
of that problem, I was going to end up
in my default future. I was going to end up as that perverted or 80-year-old man. And I knew that I
needed to do the work. Now this also relates to
the concept of karma. Karma is very
misunderstood topic in the world is a lot of
misconceptions around it. Usually in the West, it's misunderstood as
being this sort of cosmic magical law of karma. You get what you deserve. The idea is if you tell a lie, then a piano is going to fall
on your cat the next day. And people will say, Oh, it must be your karma. You've got what you deserved. But the truth is, karma is much closer to the
law of cause and effect. That everything you do has ripple effects,
has consequences. And it's also understanding
that everything that exists today is because of the causes and conditions
that came before it. It's a very scientific way
of looking at the world. Understanding that everything
you do has consequences. Not only what you do, but even what you
think and what you pay attention to has ripple effects. And so taking responsibility for your own actions and the
ripple effects that they have. This is what ownership is about. It's also good to
know the difference between fault and
responsibility. And I loved this idea
that it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility. For social media. It's not your fault that
you're addicted to it. It's billions of dollars of investment has gone into making things like
social media endpoint. Very addictive to
the human mind. It's not your fault,
It's important. Society's fault. It's the cultures fault. It's the fault of
our physiology. But the question is, whose responsibility is
it to make a change? And the only important
answer to that is you. There are other
ways to answer it. It is also the
responsibility perhaps of the **** industry to not make things so
addictive or whatever. But the only one that
you should focus on is that it is
your responsibility. You can't wait for other people to make a
change in your life. That's what this
lecture is all about. Taking responsibility, taking
ownership for your life. The more you understand
this concept on an intuitive or
experiential level, the easier habit
change is going to be. It's one thing to understand
this conceptually or theoretically to know that
it's your responsibility. But when you really start to grasp it on that
intuitive level, that you need to take action to take responsibility
for your life. The more you get that
from the inside out, the easier it is going to
be to change your habits, to change your life, to really transform
the way you're living. Taking ownership is what keeps us out of that victim mentality. It keeps us out of laziness. It's what allows us
to move forward. How do you cultivate this
sense of taking ownership? How do you get started? While you, by now
you've probably guessed that we're gonna do a
little bit of journaling to help you discover where are some opportunities in your
life for taking ownership. Go ahead, grab that piece
of paper and a pen. Grab your journal and get ready for the next
journaling exercise. So the first thing
to write about, the first thing to
journal about is this. To whom or to what have I
been giving away my power? To whom or to what have I
been giving away my power? Do this one is a free
flow journaling exercise. So just let thoughts
flow onto the paper. See what comes out. Spend a few minutes on this one. So go ahead and pause the video, spend a few minutes and
I'll see you back here. All right, the next one,
next journaling prompt. In what ways have I been avoiding taking
ownership in my life? What ways have I been avoiding taking
ownership in my life? Again, do this as a
free flow journaling. Let your thoughts flow onto the paper and see
what comes out. So pause this video and I'll
see you back in a second. Alright, the next
journaling prompt, where can I start
taking responsibility? Where can I start taking
responsibility in my life? Pause the video, take some
time to answer this one. Finally, this is the final reflection
question of the lecture. To reflect on this question, if I were the CEO of my life, how would I live differently? If I were the CEO of my life? How would I live differently? Really take some time
to reflect on this. Give yourself the time and the space to ponder
this question, to dive into this question. This is something we're going to come back to again and again. Cultivating that sense of
being the CEO of your life, being that leader within how
do you take responsibility? How would you live differently? Pause the video, take the
time to answer this one. I'll write. I hope these questions have
helped to inspire you, give you some of
that self-awareness around where you can
start taking ownership, taking responsibility
for the things that are going on in your life.
11. 1.9 - Module Wrap-Up: Congratulations on
finishing module one. This module has really been about finding a
direction to walk in our life and also finding the motivation to
begin that journey. What is the fuel that's going to propel us and help us overcome the eventual or the
inevitable obstacles we're going to find
along the way. By now, you should have
a good understanding of where you want to go. In the next few modules, we're gonna be looking
at some of the mindsets, the habits and routines
that are gonna help you get there. What is it that's going to
take you where you want to go? So that's it for Module one. I'll see you in the next module.
12. 2.1 - Untrained Warriors: This module is all about
cultivating a strong foundation, particularly a strong
mental foundation. These inner strength
qualities that are gonna be crucial on your path to getting unhooked from your
digital addiction. I'd like to start
off with one of my favorite quotes on the
subject of training the mind. In this comes from the
Indian monk Yogananda. And he says This, untrained warriors are soon
killed on the battlefield. Also person's untrained
in the art of preserving their inner peace or
quickly riddled by the bullets of worry and
restlessness, inactive life. So we'll also
people untrained in the art of preserving
their inner peace, riddled by the bullets of worry and restlessness,
inactive life. If your goal here is to break free from the
behavioral addictions, things like using your
cell phone too much, using ***********,
using social media. Then you've got to start with where the addiction
itself starts. And this is in the mind. It's only once we build this strong mental foundation that we can move forward
with our recovery. Again, I talked
about this earlier, but if we don't work on that inner part of
our inner strength, we don't build that
strong a foundation then no matter what
we do externally, those same forces of craving, of avoidance and procrastination will just pop up somewhere else. Doing this work at the
outset, at the beginning. Building up those
strong mental factors is going to be crucial. When you're ready to dive in. Go ahead and join me
in the next video.
13. 2.2 - Neuroplasticity: Let's start with
understanding the mind. If you are addicted to
phones or social media, essentially what is happening is that your mind is
out-of-control. You are continuing
to do things despite knowing that they
are holding you back in some way
or causing harm. Often these habits are subconscious or
unconscious behaviors. We're not really conscious of
the fact that we've pulled out our phone and open
up the Instagram app. What's going on
is that your mind is stuck in a habit loop. The reason that this
happens is that the brain forms these deep
grooves over time. The same way that if you
have a big field of grass, if you walk through
that field of grass, once, nothing's going to happen. But if you walk on the same path again and again and again, eventually a pathway
forms through that field. And this is how it works
in the mind as well, is that we have formed these
deep grooves in the mind. So the question we can
ask ourselves now is, how do we get rid of mental habit patterns that
are no longer serving us? If we find some mental
habits that are detrimental, that are holding us back, how can we change
those mental pathways? Now it used to be believed
that your mind developed all of its neural pathways and connections when you were young. And then sometime in your
teenage years you stopped forming new connections and that it was all
downhill from there. For what we understand now is that your mind is constantly forming new pathways and forming new connections
throughout your life. This is something that we
know as neuroplasticity. The essential idea
is that what you think and do an
even what you pay attention to is
changing the structure and function of your brain
throughout your life. For example, if
you're constantly thinking thoughts of craving, maybe saying, I want
this new thing, I want this new thing. The mental pathways in the mind associated
with the thought. I need this thing in
order to be happy, are going to be strengthened. If you are constantly
pulling out your phone and
opening up Instagram. The neural habit of
pulling out your phone, clicking on the Instagram app. Again, that is strengthening
that neural habit loop. So a quote that I love that's
related to this is that neurons that fire
together, wire together. The more often you use any
sort of neural pathway, you're literally strengthening the connections
between those neurons. You're increasing the
synaptic strength. The Buddha said something
very similar 2500 years ago. He said, What you
frequently think and ponder upon becomes the
inclination of the mind. The more often we think
a certain type of thought that is going to be
the inclination of the mind. We're going to be steering
the mind in that direction. Now when I first discovered this concept of neuroplasticity, kind of hit me like a rock
hitting me over the head. I started to realize how much I was hard wiring
**** into my mind. Every time I opened up ****, Every time I looked
or clicked on a new lane or opened
up a new window, I was hard wiring in that loop, that behavior in the mind of seeking out novelty,
seeking ****. Now fortunately, we can use neuroplasticity
to our advantage. We can identify the
mental qualities that are going to
lead us to happiness, to joy and contentment
and success, whatever it is we want, we can identify what's
going to take us there. And then we can strengthen
those neural pathways. It's very similar to
training muscles in the gym. Let's say you identify certain
muscles you want to train. And then you go into the gym, you do certain exercises to strengthen those
specific muscles. We can do the same with mental qualities that are going to lead us where
we want to get too. In the following lectures, I'm going to be introducing the five key mental qualities or mental muscles that
you're gonna need on this pathway of getting unhooked from your
digital addiction. When you're ready, I'll
see you in the next video.
14. 2.3 - Mindfulness: The first and arguably most
important mental quality we can cultivate is
simply awareness. Seeing clearly what's happening
in our emotional world, in our mental space, and then the external
environment. The reason that this is
so critical is that it forms the foundation for everything else we
can hope to do. If you're not aware
of what's happening, how can you possibly think
to fix it if you are just a drift on autopilot
or asleep at the wheel, it really doesn't matter what
intentions you might have. You won't be able
to change anything. Often when we're
stuck in addictions, we're living just like a zombie, just like a slave to whatever
desires are in front of us. This aspect of waking
up to our life, we're really seeing clearly how we're living is so critical. Now often what causes
us to reach for our phone or pull out
our laptop and act out in these addictive
ways is often some hidden or subtle
or subconscious emotion that we're trying to
avoid or get away from. So it might be something like Fordham, might be loneliness. It might be regret of remembering something we did in the past that
wasn't so skillful. Often these uncomfortable
emotions cause us to act out without awareness, without mindfulness, we
don't see this happening. But if we can
cultivate awareness, we can see the link between
the uncomfortable emotion, the desire to escape it, and then the acting out by
pulling out our cell phone, pulling up the computer,
go into the kitchen, whatever it is that we use
as debt avoidance mechanism. How do we cultivate this
mental muscle of awareness? How can we wake up more
fully to our life? Well, this is
really the skill of mindfulness that
we're talking about. One very simple definition of mindfulness is being
aware of what's happening in our
internal world and external world as
it's happening. I would also add that it's with particular qualities like
curiosity and kindness. But in its simplest definition, we can think of it as
just this quality of being aware of what's
happening as it's happening. When it comes to the world of addiction and recovery and
the work we're doing here. We also really need to
focus on more awareness of our internal state,
the internal landscape. What are the emotions that we're feeling in any given moment? What are the thoughts that are arising in any given moment? In this video, I'll
talk about how can we cultivate more mindfulness? How can we get started with this foundational mental muscle? Sometimes the practice of
mindfulness is referred to as a sixth sense
store awareness. And this is how we're going
to dive into this practice. You probably know that you have the five traditional senses. You have sight and smell, and taste and hearing, and touch throughout the body. There's also the sense
door of mental phenomena, emotions, thoughts,
and feelings. With mindfulness, we're
really just becoming aware of any of those six senses. Becoming aware of any
sound and smell and taste, touch in the body and you site and then any
mental phenomena. So we might be
aware of a thought, you might be aware
of an emotion. This aspect of tapping
into the sixth sense doors is one really great way of
practicing mindfulness. Another technique
that we can use in conjunction with this to amplify our awareness
of what's happening is the technique known as
noting or labeling. This is as we're paying
attention to what's happening, we just give a soft mental
note to what we're seeing. So I might start by
following my breath and I might just
note breathing in. Or if I'm paying attention
to the feeling of my belly, I might note rising. And then as I breathe
out in the belly falls, I can note following. If I hear a sound, I can just make a mental
note hearing, hearing. We're just using
this technique of noting as a way to begin observing whatever's arising in our experience in the
guided meditation that's included in this course. You'll find a introduction, a tutorial step-by-step guide to cultivating this
$0.06 door awareness. So go ahead and enjoy
that guided meditation. And then I'll see you
in the next video.
15. 2.3b - Guided Meditation: Mindfulness: Welcome to this guided
meditation practice on developing more mindfulness. Go ahead and find a
nice comfortable seat. Posture where you can feel both relaxed and alert
at the same time. Just take a few moments to
settle into your posture. Maybe closing your eyes or having a nice soft gaze
towards the ground. And we can start just by
taking a few deep breaths, breathing in deeply,
breathing out slowly. And then just allow
your breath to return to its natural rhythm. Maybe start to check in and
just notice where do you feel your breath in your body? Can you feel the belly
rising and falling? This is mindfulness
of body sensation. If you can just tune into
the physical sensation, the texture of the breath. Noticing the way the belly
expands on the in-breath. The way the belly falls
on the out-breath. And then shifting your
attention and bringing some awareness to hearing. Just notice what are the sounds you're aware of in this moment. Can you hear sounds
that are far away? Maybe sounds that are close by. This is awareness of hearing. Now shifting your awareness
to your nostrils. Just sensing into
the sense of smell. Maybe there's no strong
smell in this moment, but maybe there is just
getting curious about that. Sense store smell. Shifting your awareness now
to the tongue and the mouth. Is there any taste
that's present? Maybe there's no strong taste
and maybe there is again, just getting curious,
sensing into that area. And then maybe checking in with the sense of vision and seeing. You might try opening your
eyes just a little bit. Staring down towards the ground and tune into the
sense of sight. What do you see? Can you be aware of different
colors and shapes? Just the awareness of seeing. Closing your eyes once again, bringing your awareness
back to your body. Feeling your breath. Back to that awareness of
physical sensation in the body. Now, opening up to
your emotional state. What emotions are present? Maybe a feeling of restlessness, sleepiness, hope, sadness, just checking
in with that. Mental phenomena. Also becoming aware of thoughts. Words in the mind. This is the awareness
of mental phenomena. Thoughts, feelings,
and emotions. Great work. This is a basic introduction to the
$0.06 stores of mindfulness. To close the practice, you can take a deep breath in. Deep breath out. Great job.
16. 2.4 - Concentration: In this society that
we live in today, there is no shortage
of distractions. There's YouTube and
Instagram and Twitter, and email and dating apps, and our kitchen and the food. The list can go on and on of the things we can
distract ourselves with. To make matters worse, we carry the ultimate
distraction machine in our pocket at all times. That tiny little
cell phone that has the most information
the universe has overseen on one little device. I like to say that
having a social media or **** addiction is like
being addicted to alcohol and walking around with a flask of vodka in your
pocket wherever you go. There's literally no escape from things like social
media and ****. If that's what you're interested
in, just ask yourself, how much time do you waste on all these little distractions
throughout the day? How often does the thought? Let me just check my email, turn it into 30 minutes of doom scrolling on CNN or Twitter. Just imagine what you could
accomplish in your life. If you can really take
back control of your mind, if you could focus more and find that stillness and
stability of mind. In this lecture, we're
gonna be focusing on this quality of
concentration or focus, building up that internal
strength of mind. Now there are a few benefits
to cultivating your focus. The first benefit is that
it's a performance enhancer. We know now that it's
so much performance is lost when we do
this task switching, we often think that multitasking will make
us better performers. But there's so much
evidence now showing that multitasking leads to a
decline in performance. Another benefit is that
we can notice more quickly when we slip
off into distraction. Instead of getting lost on
Instagram for 30 minutes. Maybe you notice after five minutes that it wasn't
what you intended to do, you can bring your attention
back to the task at hand. And finally, focus
or concentration. It just feels good. The final benefit is that it leads to a state of
well-being when we are concentrated and focused in deeply engaged with
what we're doing. To an extreme, if you dive into these in these
meditative states, they can even lead to
blissful experiences. Sometimes these are called the jhanas or absorption states. And they can be quite blissful. But just this sense of feeling good when we're
engaged in something, when we're in that state of flow in the guided
meditation that follows, all be giving you a
step-by-step tutorial on how to do the basics of
a concentration meditation. The essence of this
practice is to set an anchor for yourself, to pick one object
for your attention, and to keep your mind coming back to that spot
again and again. For most people, this
would be the breath using the feeling of
the breath in the body. And then whenever your
attention wanders away, you just gently guided back to your anchor,
to the breath. This is going to happen
again and again and again. What's important to
know here is that it's the noticing distraction
and coming back. This is like the bicep
curl of concentration. To actually see distraction and wandering away
as a good thing. Because it gives you the
opportunity to come back to strengthen that muscle of
returning your attention. Often people will try to practice some form of this
focused attention practice. And whenever they
get lost in thought, they'd get discouraged
thinking this is a bad thing. But when you see it correctly, you see that it's actually
an opportunity to do another bicep curl to
strengthen that attention. You ready to try it out? Go ahead and click on
that guided meditation to get a taste of
concentration practice. Then I'll see you
in the next video.
17. 2.4b - Guided Meditation: Concentration: Welcome to this guided
meditation practice on developing concentration. Once again, finding a
nice comfortable seat somewhere or you can
sit comfortably, relaxed, but at the same
time alert and awake. And allowing the eyes to close. For this practice will be
using the tool of an anchor. Single spot in the body that you come back to over and over. Maybe start by connecting
with your breathing. Just allowing the body
to breathe naturally. Notice where do you feel your breath most
clearly in the body. As you sit still. Whereas the breath
most apparent. It might be the movement of the belly or the expansion
and contraction of the chest. Maybe the feeling of air coming in and out of the nostrils. Just choosing one spot where
you feel it most clearly. For the rest of this meditation, make that your anchor spot. See if you can just follow
the movement of the breath. Physical sensations
at that one location. If you're using the belly, just feeling the rising
and falling of the belly. Eventually you'll notice your
mind starts to wander off. And when this happens, just gently guide yourself
back to that same anchor spot. The mind again gets
distracted by a thought or a sound very gently
without any judgment. Guiding your attention back. Feeling the in-breath. Using the out-breath. No matter how many times
your mind wanders off. Practice is to simply guide
yourself back to the breath. Starting again. Knowing that each
time you notice the distraction and
come back here, strengthening that
muscle of concentration. Strengthening your ability
to reorient your attention. Just noticing where is
your attention right now? Can you guide it back
towards the breath? Connecting with the
feeling in the body? If you find it helpful, you can quietly in your mind, say breathing in
with the in-breath. Quietly in your mind, say breathing out
with the out-breath. Breathing in, feeling the
sensation of the breath. Breathing out, feeling the
sensation of the out-breath. The moment you notice that
your mind has wandered off, really see if you can be
gentle with yourself. No judgment, no criticism. Just noticing, lost
in thought again. Start again at the breath. Then to close this practice, we can take a deep breath in. Deep breath out. Great job. That was an introduction to concentration
meditation practice.
18. 2.5 - Impulse Control: The next key skill we
can cultivate is what we might call impulse control
or self-management. This ability to not
act on every impulse, every urge that we have, but to be more intentional
about our actions. Another way of thinking
about this is to be responsive rather
than reactive. There's this great quote, and it comes from a summary of Victor Frankel's work by
the author Stephen Covey. And the quote goes like this, between stimulus and
response, there's a space. And in that space is your
power to choose your response. And in your response lies
your growth and your freedom. So the question is, can we access that space
between stimulus and response? For most people that space is 0. There's some stimulus and we
just react right away and maybe we see a doughnut and we grab for it and put
it in our mouth. We pull out our phone and we see the Instagram app and we just click on it
without thinking. The question is, can we
be more intentional? Can we see these
impulses to act? And then think about, is this how I want
to live my life? Do I want to click
on this button? Do I want to eat this food? Do I want to behave in this way? Or is there something that's
more aligned with my values, a different way of living? So what are the
real-world applications of this mental quality for? I hope it's obvious. Let's say you're
sitting on the couch late at night and you're
watching a movie, and all of a sudden there's a boring spot in
the movie and you get this impulse to pull out your phone and
check your email. Can you actually
have the willpower, this strength of my
net impulse control to not actually reach into
your pocket and pull it out, put to just leave it there. In the world we live in
of hyper distractions and tasty foods and tasty
tidbits on the Internet. Having impulse control is
a bit like a superpower. So how do we cultivate
more impulse control? How do we learn this
tool of self-management? One very simple practice
that I love is to simply practice sitting
still in your meditation. The key to it is this. The next time you sit
down for a meditation? Let's say it's a
five-minute meditation or a ten minute meditation. To sit down with the intention. At once you get yourself in your posture to not
move a single muscle. To notice when you have an H
that you'd like to scratch, but instead of itching it
to simply notice the urge. The same for shifting
your legs or fidgeting and see if you
can avoid actually moving. Just notice the urge to move, but don't act on it. The more often that you do this, what you're doing is
training yourself to not act on every
impulse you have, but to observe and just notice the urge
without acting on it. Another thing we
can do to cultivate more impulse control is to cultivate something
called equanimity or to do an equanimity
meditation practice. Equanimity essentially
is the ability of the mind to be non-reactive. It is that aspect
of impulse control. At the root level. What it is, it's the
ability of the mind to see something pleasant without
grasping after it, and to see something or
experience something unpleasant without running away from it or pushing
the thing away. This is the quality of equanimity in the form of
a meditation practice. What this would look like is simply noticing what's arising, whether it's pleasant
or unpleasant, without reacting to it. For example, you might notice an unpleasant
sensation in the body, like a pain in the body. To simply notice
unpleasant without trying to push it away or think only this
pain weren't here. But to observe it, to turn towards that experience. Similarly, when you experience
something pleasant, can you simply observe it
without feeling the need to grasp after it,
even emotionally? Often if we have a pleasant
experience in meditation, we think, oh, yes, that's it. I want more of that experience. But can you simply say,
Oh, that's pleasant. I don't need more of it. I don't need to hold
onto this feeling. I can just let it
pass through me. This is cultivating
a detachment or non-attachment to
pleasant sensation. And it's cultivating,
letting go of aversion or running
away from unpleasant. This is gonna be
really valuable in your task of building up
your impulse control. In the meditation that follows, we'll do a bit of both of these, the sitting still practice. And then also this
practice of equanimity. Noting whether something
is pleasant or unpleasant without
reacting to it. Go ahead, enjoy that meditation and then I'll see you
in the next video.
19. 2.5b - Guided Meditation: Impulse Control: Welcome to this guided
meditation practice on cultivating more
impulse control. Once again, finding a
comfortable posture, allowing the eyes to close. Maybe starting with just a
few grounding deep breaths. Breathing in deeply. Exhaling fully. One more deep breath
just at your own pace. One way of cultivating impulse control is to simply
practice sitting still. For this meditation. I'll invite you to find a
comfortable seat and then see if you can just
keep that posture. Noticing when you
might have the impulse to change your posture. Maybe to scratch an itch. Instead, see if you
can remain still. Like a tall, majestic mountain. Over time, this
practice of sitting still can help you
deal with impulses. Instead of reacting impulsively. Can you simply sit and watch? As you sit? We can also practice
some mindful breathing. You breathe, just feeling
the sensations in the body. Feeling the belly rising
with the in-breath, falling with the out-breath. Cultivating that focused
attention or concentration. Staying with the anchor. Whenever your mind wanders off, just gently coming
back to the breath. Again with that intention for this practice of sitting still. If you notice an impulse in
the body to move or shift, can you just give it a
label? There is an itch. A desire to move my legs. No need to judge it or grit
your teeth in resistance, but just notice when a desire
to move or shift arises. Nothing else you need
to do right now. Just allow yourself to sit. Maybe notice your breath. Good feel that stability
of sitting still. Sometimes the urge to move, fidget will be strong. There might be a strong
itch in the body. When this happens, see if you can notice the urge
in that first moment. If you need to shift or
just do it mindfully. Not a reactive movement. Intentional decision. It can also be helpful to bring in the phrases
of equanimity. Reminding yourself this
is how it is right now. Right now it's like
this non-reactive, calm state of mind that's
just aware of how things are. Without grasping after pleasure or running away from pain. Simply sitting still. And to close this practice, we can take a deep
breath in a deep breath. Great job. This is
a first meditation, introduction to impulse control and learning how to sit still.
20. 2.6 - Self-Compassion: One of the most overlooked
mental qualities that we can cultivate, compassion, and in particular, self-compassion or self-love, especially when it
comes to changing habit patterns that we
might be ashamed of or insecure about cultivating this ability to treat
yourself with kindness, to love who you are. It's an absolutely
essential part of the path to recovery. Why is self-love so important to recovery at the foundation
of any type of addiction, whether it's a drug or alcohol
addiction or won't one of these more behavioral
addictions is this fundamental inability to be at ease with yourself
and who you are. There's this underlying need to escape the reality
of who you are in that present
moment when we're self-critical or
judging ourselves, it can lead us into these
downward spirals of acting out. So what happens is we feel
bad about what's going on. We seek to act out
either from distraction or numbing out or some way of easing the
pain of that moment. This leads us to feeling
worse about ourselves. And so we act out again, and that's the downward spiral. The solution to
this problem is to learn how to love who you are. Not in an egotistical
or conceded way, but from this place of knowing that you are worthy
of love and respect, developing that sense of
self-worth from within. When you start to love
yourself and you start to heal the relationship
you have with yourself. Not only is it easier
to break free from addictive behaviors
are addictive habits. But your world in general is just a more positive
place to live in. Your world becomes more
joyful, more contented. Just a nicer way
to live when you actually enjoy the
voice in your head. It reminds me of this
ancient samurai poem. It goes like this. I make my mind, my friend. Just imagine what your life
would be like if your mind and your thoughts were
supportive rather than critical. If you were your own best
ally in any situation, what would that allow for you to achieve or
accomplish or feel? Just stop and think for a moment of how much better
your life would be if you could be kind to yourself even when you
mess up at something. So how do we begin to cultivate this
quality of self-love? How do we start
loving ourselves, particularly if our whole life, we've been beating ourselves up. There are two key methods, so I'll describe both of them. The first is to reflect
upon this question. What would a friend say
to me about this issue? If a close friend or a mentor, we're here in new about
this problem I were facing. What would they say to me? Often when you do this
little reflection, it can help and give you this additional perspective to realize you might be treating
yourself a little too hard. You can also flip
this around and say, if a friend of mine were struggling with the
exact same issue, what would I say to them? Usually again, when you
do this reflection, you see that you shouldn't
be so hard on yourself. So that's one way of
starting to cultivate this kind or voice in your mind. The second way is through
what we might call a loving kindness
meditation practice. This is where we
are intentionally using these phrases
of loving kindness, sometimes called
metta meditation, to wish well for some being. And we can direct those
well-wishes at other people. We can also direct
those well-wishes. I'd ourselves. The main idea, again, getting back to
neuroplasticity is that if we practice a thought
often enough, over time, it becomes the
inclination of the mind. It becomes the habitual
responsive demand. So in loving-kindness
meditation, we simply repeat these
phrases of loving kindness again and again and
again over time. That becomes the
habitual response. For traditional loving-kindness. You might repeat phrases like, may you be happy, may you be peaceful. May you be safe? May you be protected. For this one? We're going
to shift it a little bit. We're gonna do a bit more
of the compassion phrase. And this is to specifically oriented towards the
suffering of someone. What the phrases would
be in the case of compassion or
something more like, I care about my pain. I care about my suffering. May I be free from
pain and suffering? It's this quality of
orienting the mind. Well wishing in the face
of someone suffering. We can do this by directing
it at someone we care about. And then we can turn that
same quality on ourselves. So go ahead and check out
the guided meditation. You're gonna get
an introduction to a compassion
meditation practice. After that, I'll see
you in the next video.
21. 2.6b - Guided Meditation: Self-Compassion: Welcome to this guided
meditation on self-compassion. Go ahead and find a
nice comfortable seat. Relaxing into your posture. Maybe closing the eyes. Take a few moments
to soften the body. Maybe relaxing the tension
in the neck and shoulders. Softening the
muscles in the face, the muscles around the eyes, and letting the belly be soft. For this practice
of self-compassion, we'll do a form of loving-kindness or
compassion meditation. To do this first, bring to mind someone from
your life who you care about. Who has also been
a mentor for you. Benefactor might be someone like a former teacher or coach, maybe an older relative. Someone who has helped you
out in life in some way. Visualize this person
sitting in front of you. Seeing the way they smile. As if they were looking
directly at you. And reflecting on
this person's life. Knowing that they also go
through times of difficulty. In times of sadness
and frustration. Times of anger or loneliness. Reflecting on the pain that this person inevitably
fields from time to time. Knowing this, we can send them
our compassionate wishes. In your mind, repeating
these phrases. As you imagine sending these
wishes to this person. I care about your pain. I care about your suffering. May you be free from
pain and suffering? Again, just visualize
this person and connect with that feeling that cares for their well-being. Again, the phrases, I
care about your pain. I care about your suffering. May you be free from
pain and suffering? Can you connect with that
feeling of wishing well for this person, caring for them? Maybe in your mind, you might imagine giving
this person a hug. I'm putting an arm around them. Just letting them know that
you're there for this person. Is feeling is the
feeling of compassion. Now we can shift this
feeling towards ourselves. Bring your own self to mind. Think of something difficult
in your life right now. Maybe a feeling of
irritation with someone. Maybe frustration with yourself, is something that is difficult. Then can we become this compassionate
friend for ourselves? To do this? Repeating
those phrases. I care about my pain. I care about my suffering. May I be free from
pain and suffering? See if he can connect with that feeling of just
caring for yourself. Can you turn towards your suffering with
kindness and compassion? I care about my pain and
care about my suffering. May you be free from
pain and suffering? May I live with ease? May be helpful to visualize
giving yourself a hug, whatever that looks like. Putting an arm around
your own shoulder. Just saying to yourself,
I'm here for you. Tapping into that
flavor of care. Compassion. Great job. This was a guided meditation on cultivating self-compassion.
22. 2.7 - Contentment: In the final quality we need on this pathway to getting
unhooked is contentment. In many ways in our life, we are training the mind to want more without
even realizing it. From the ads we see on TV to the curated Instagram profiles
that we're looking at, to the **** videos we
might be watching where everything is kind of
fake and manicured. We are training the
mind to always be wanting more and better
and faster and stronger. It can feel like no matter
how far we've come, no matter how much
we've achieved, we're always in this state of lack of not being
good enough yet. And that can be really
detrimental to our mental health. Of course, the
antidote to this state of lack or not having enough, we're not being enough is to cultivate that sense of
contentment with her life. To cultivate this satisfaction, this deeply rooted satisfaction with what we have
and who we are, you can be the richest
person in the world. But if you're always focused
on what other people have, you can still be miserable. We probably all know
these stories of celebrities who seemed
to have it all, who have all the material
positions in the world. But then are suffering
from depression are sometimes commit suicide
because of that mental illness. Hopefully we can learn
the lesson in this, which is that happiness
and satisfaction doesn't come from
external things. It doesn't come from
material wealth, comes from our
relationship to what we have and who we are, and the relationships
we have in our life. And that the more we
think our happiness lies in external
things or an approval, the more miserable will become. So think for a moment about your own digital addiction and what brought you
here to this course. And how much of your
behavior around that digital addiction is from some subtle yearning
for more in life. Maybe you want more likes or more comfort or more
pleasure, more approval. Whatever it is, is this sense of not having enough
or not being enough. Just imagine what it
would be like to be truly content with who and what you
are in the present moment. Most of these addictions would fall away if you
were truly content. So how do we cultivate
contentment? Again, what we know is that what we practice grows stronger. One simple way that you are probably familiar
with is something like a gratitude journal every day to simply write down three things that
you're grateful for. Each time you're doing this, you're training the mind to look at what am I grateful
for in my life? What do I appreciate
in my life right now? That's one very simple way of cultivating more containment. We can also do this in a formal meditation practice to do something like a
gratitude meditation, where you are
actually simply being grateful for whatever you
notice in the meditation. One way that I really
like to do this is through a gratitude body scan. This is to go
through the body and simply bring some gratitude
to each part of the body. For example, to feel the
breathing of the lungs and be grateful for the air that it's bringing
to the rest of your body. Even on a very subtle
level of attending to the breath ring
mindful of each breath. Can you be content with
just the way the breath is, not wanting it to be deeper or more pleasant or
anything like that. But just saying this and breath the way it is
right now is good enough. Also with your
meditation in general, can you bring that
quality of acceptance and contentment to the
quality of your meditation, not wanting it to be other
than India's purchased. Saying the way this meditation is right now is good enough. Checkout the guided meditation
that's attached and dive into this practice of
contentment and gratitude. And then I'll see you
in the next video.
23. 2.7b - Guided Meditation: Contentment: Welcome to this
guided meditation on developing gratitude. Finding a nice
comfortable posture. Allowing the eyes to close. Starting with deep breath, breathing in, exhaling, fully. Softening the body. Finding that place of stillness. Starting by tuning
into the breath. Noticing where you
feel your breath. Cultivating that
mindful presence. There are many ways to
practice gratitude. We can simply orient
the mind towards appreciation of what is
present in our life. It can be as simple as
starting with the breath. Can we be thankful for
each and every breath? As you breathe in? Can you appreciate the feeling? The subtle warm
vibrations in the body? Perhaps sending gratitude
to the body for breathing, bringing air and the oxygen, all the different
parts of the body. We can expand this gratitude to other parts of
the body as well. Starting at the top of the head. Moving downward. Bringing your awareness
to your eyes. Can you be grateful for
the eyes, for seeing? Thank you for giving
me the gift of sight. Down to the nose. Thank you for smelling. Thank you for giving
me the gift of smell. And down to the mouth, feeling the tongue, the teeth. Thank you for giving
me the gift of taste and the gift of speech. May I not take these
things for granted? Moving down the neck
and into the shoulders. Moving your awareness
down through the arms and into the hands. Sending some appreciation
for the arms and hands. Thank you for allowing me to use my arms and hands to
interact with the world. Feeling into the palms of the
hands and all the fingers. Appreciating what
these allow you to do. Cooking, writing,
typing, playing games. Moving throughout the world. Bringing your awareness
back up through the arms and into the
center of the chest. Being aware of the lungs. Can you be grateful
for the lungs? Thank you for breathing
every moment of my life. Moving down through the abdomen, all the way down into the legs. Maybe feeling the right leg
first and then the left leg. Again feeling that appreciation. Thank you for moving the
throughout the world. Giving me the gift of mobility. Then expanding your awareness throughout the body and
just seeing is there anywhere else is
calling for a year. Gratitude. Now I'm bringing your awareness back
to the breath. Can you be content
with just this breath? Nothing more and nothing less. To close this practice, we can take a deep breath in. Deep breath out. Well done. This was a gratitude body scan
and appreciation practice.
24. 2.8 - Module Wrap-Up: Great work on building these
strong mental foundations. By now you've done the work to establish a strong and compelling
vision for the future. And you've started to
lay the foundation of mental qualities that are going to help
take you there. In the next module, we're gonna start diving into the science of Habit Change, habit formation, and
looking at the routines and behaviors that are
going to bring real lasting change
into your life. When you are ready for that, go ahead and check out that next module and I'll see you there.
25. 3.1 - Physical health habits: This module is all
about activation. How do we activate a new set of daily habits and routines? How do we master the
art of self-discipline? And what do we need to
know about habit change to be on that
transformation journey? This is all about
the nitty-gritty of changing your
habits and behaviors. And it all starts with the body, if any habit change
or recovery program that you are taking
part in doesn't include a honest
and courageous look at how you're taking
care of the body, then it is incomplete. I don't care how much
mindset work you do. If you're not taking care of the three physical
health habits, then whatever change you find is not going to be sustainable. It's not going to last
in the long-term. And it's not gonna be as
effective or as easy to reach. In this video, I'll be covering the three physical health habits that should be at the forefront
of your recovery journey. These are exercise,
nutrition and sleep. Just a note here, this
is not going to be a comprehensive coverage of any of these three categories. Each of the three categories can and should have
its own course. And we're just going to be
covering the basics here, just some quick tips to get you started for these
physical health habits. So first up, physical
health habit number one is exercise. So many people think that
energy is a limited supply, that if you exercise
it's going to deplete your energy and take away
from other activities. But the truth is, is that
the opposite is true. The more we exercise, the more energy we have
on a day-to-day basis. It actually replenishes
your batteries, it gives you energy back. My guess is that you've
experienced this. If you sit on the couch all day. If you're lazy, if you're
not doing a whole lot, you feel lethargic,
like you don't have any energy to even go for
a walk around the street. But if you get in the habit of, let's say going for a run each morning or going for
a walk every day. You actually feel more energized
on a day-to-day basis. You feel lighter on your feet, like you can do
more in each day, aside from the fact that exercise actually
gives you energy, we know it also plays a role
in changing your habits. It actually improves
your ability to regulate your emotions. It improves your self-control
in your willpower, and it boosts your
mood and well-being. Exercise should really
be at the forefront of any transformation you're
trying to bring into your life. So i'll, I'll offer to you just a few basic tips if
you're new to exercise. If you don't know how
to get started with it. Here are a couple easy tips of how to introduce
it into your life. Tip number one is to
simply start your day with five push-ups
and five air squats. This is an easy way to start
getting the body moving, especially at the
start of the day. All it takes is five push-ups
and five air squats. There is literally no excuse
that you can't do that. Anyone can get
started with that. Tip number two is
to walk more often. Here what I recommend
is see if you can get around 10 thousand
steps per day. You don't need an
activity tracker. Most phones will also
be tracking your steps. It's not gonna be as accurate, but it's a good sense of
how far you're moving. That 10 thousand mark is
a good amount to aim for. It gets you out of the house, gets you moving around. Tip number three is to
find a sport that you like or a group
exercise activity. This might be going
to a yoga class. It might be going and playing
some pickup basketball, but finding something to
do that you actually enjoy the movement is going to
help you get more exercise. What it comes down to is just finding something
that works for you, find ways to move
the body everyday. Physical health habit number
two is all about nutrition. This, we can look on that quote that we've
all heard before, that you are what you eat. Now this is a literal statement. You are literally
made up of the atoms, the molecules and compounds
that you put into your body. So the question for you is, do you want to be made up of candy and Doritos and junk food? Or do you want your
body to be made up of real whole foods? There's so much science behind how proper nutrition can make us feel better and live longer and improve our mental
performance as well. So just take a
moment and reflect on how your nutrition is going. Are you feeding yourself
with nourishing food? Or are you putting
junk into your body? Here are my top three
nutrition tips. Tip number one is just to reduce the amount of
sugar in your diet. We know that sugar is the
**** of the food industry. It's hyper stimulating and there's no real
nutritional value. It's addictive, it's just
overall not that good for you. You don't need to be
super extreme about this. You don't need to cut
it out completely. And it's great to enjoy your life and treat
yourself once in awhile. But just see if you can
reduce the amount of sugar, the sugar in so many
things these days, it can be easy to go
overboard without knowing it. Nutrition tip number two is
just to eat whole foods. And when I say whole foods, foods that don't have
too many ingredients on the ingredients label. If there's a whole list of things that you don't
know how to pronounce. There's a good chance
it's not a whole food. Things like whole
vegetables, fruits, meats, things of
that nature where it's just a single
ingredient in there. That's gonna be a whole
food nutrition tip number three is to eat in moderation to see if you can eat just up until the
point before you get full. A tip that I like to offer
to some of my clients is see if you can stop eating
two bytes before your full. This is gonna be a
great practice in mindful eating and also
just self-awareness, knowing what's going
on in your body. Those are my three tips on
healthy eating and nutrition, physical health habit number
three is all about sleep. Again, there's so much
science on this topic. I don't need to
go into too much, but just we know now
how important sleep is for all sorts of aspects of your mental
health and well-being. Not to mention
what it can do for our ability to self-control, to have self-discipline, to manage our cravings
and addictions. So if you want to
be at your best, It's important to improve
not just the quantity, but also the quality
of your sleep. Here are a few tips on
improving your sleep. The first is see if you can get at least eight
hours of sleep a night. The next thing you can do
to help yourself out is to limit the screen
time before bed. Nice rule of thumb is to
put down all your screens, whether it's your phone
or computer or your TV, at least one to two hours
before you go to bed. The third tip that's gonna
be really helpful is to keep your phone
out of your room. This is a huge one, particularly if
you're struggling with any sort of
digital addiction. Keep that phone plugged in, in your kitchen and
your living room. You can leave it in your car. If you have a car just
somewhere that is not in your room within
reach of your bed, is one of the most
important things that you can do for getting better sleep and also helping to beat those
digital addictions. The last tip is to make your room as dark and
as cool as possible. We know that the body
thrives for sleep. These dark and cool conditions. So putting out blackout blinds, getting that AC on
if you're able to finding a way to optimize
the sleep environment. Now that's just a
crash course on sleep. If you want more information
on the science behind sleep and the research on
different sleep habits. You can check out my other
course sleep masterclass. All right, those are the
three physical health habits that you're going to need on this journey of
getting unhooked. Again, the key idea is
to set yourself up for success by keeping
your body healthy. We know that a healthy body
leads to a healthy mind. And a healthy mind is going
to be one that is easier to break free from these digital addictions in
these compulsive behaviors. With that, I'll see you in the next video where
we're going to dive into the topic of building a
powerful morning routine.
26. 3.2 - Morning Routine: Now one of the
best ways to start transforming your life and your daily habits is to have a powerful, inconsistent
morning routine. When you look at some of the most successful
people in the world, the majority of
them have some sort of daily ritual or
morning routine practice. Whether it's just sitting
down with a coffee in the morning paper or doing some gratitude,
journaling or meditating. There's some aspect to
that daily routine, that daily ritual at
self-discipline in the morning. That is important. Now there are three
major benefits to having a strong morning
routine practice. The first is that it just sets a positive tone at
the start of the day. That positive tone gets
carried out throughout the rest of the day into
all your other activities. There's really nothing
better than waking up and starting the day
off on the right foot. The second major
benefit to having a morning routine is that it gives you a quick
win for the day. And you can use that momentum
to accomplish other things. In the same way that
a line of dominoes, you drop the first
domino and that hits the second and
that hits the third. It's the same with getting these quick wins at the
beginning of the day. It makes it easier to
accomplish your goals later on. The third major benefit, and this is probably
the most important, is that it's an
opportunity to tackle the meaningful and
important things in your day while you're energy is high before your energy drops later on in the day before you have a lot of excuses or just start to
procrastinate on things, gives you that opportunity to tackle what's
really important to do those meaningful things
right at the start of the day. These are some of the
reasons why it's great to incorporate a morning
routine practice. Particularly if your goal is to break free from
digital addictions. Most people, when they wake up, the first thing that they
do is check their phone. And so if you can
learn how to break that habit and instead replace it with some
healthy alternatives. That's going to
make a huge impact on your life when it comes to formulating or devising a morning routine for yourself, I have six key recommendations
that you can use. The first recommendation
is to make your morning routine tech free. What I mean by that
is to put your phone on airplane mode and
put your computer away. And don't turn any
of that on until after you complete whatever
your morning routine is. So it might be a few minutes
this a few minutes of that. But leaving your phone
on airplane mode, not checking your phone, not checking your e-mail, not really doing anything tech related until after your
morning routine has done. This is one of the
most valuable things you can do for that
morning routine. It's something that my client
is telling me all the time. Just that alone makes
a huge difference. Just imagine starting
your day and having 20 minutes to
an hour where you're not plugging in instantly to the latest gossip
and breaking news, but you have that time to
connect with yourself. That's gonna be a
huge benefit for you. My recommendation number two for morning routines is
to have something called a start-up sequence. Start-up sequence is a thing. It's the very first thing you do in your morning
routine practice and it should be so simple that there's no real
thought involved. It's that thing that
just gets you going. It's the momentum. You get out of bed
and you instantly go and do this startup sequence. Maybe it should be less
than five minutes or so. It's the thing that because
it doesn't take much thought, you can just kind of get
it started and that gets the ball rolling for the
rest of the morning routine. So as an example, my start-up sequence
is a wake-up. Go use the bathroom
or washed my face, and then I go start
making coffee. That's my start-up sequence. And everyday it's the
exact same thing. It's easy for me to know
exactly what I need to do. And it just gets me out of
bed and gets me moving. Recommendation number
three is to write. This can take many
different forms. It might be something
like gratitude journaling or you're just writing out a few things you're
grateful for. It might be a free flow
journaling process where you're journaling on
a prompt and just letting your thoughts
flow onto the page. Or it can be something
like planning the day and listing out the things
you're going to do that day and what's
really important. But some way of
getting thoughts onto the paper or some way
of writing freehand. There's something
to that that is really beautiful part
of a morning practice. Lot of successful people, people who are living
intentionally have some sort of journaling or writing practice in the morning. Recommendation number
four is to read. Here is where it's about
nourishing your brain, feeding your brain
with healthy stuff. So I love non-fiction
of all different kinds, psychology, meditation,
productivity, business. But doing just a
little bit of reading in the morning can
go a long way, particularly if you
do it every day. Imagine if you spent
five to ten minutes reading and you did that
for the rest of your life. Could really learn
a lot of stuff. And it also sets that positive tone for
the rest of the day. Often I find myself reflecting on something
I read in the morning and using that insight or wisdom in whatever I'm
doing later on in the day. Recommendation number
five is to make time for meditation
or stillness. Time to slow down, to be with yourself, to kind of turn off the
mind or center the mind, or cultivate the
mental qualities that we talked about earlier. There are many different
forms of meditation. Some are about cultivating
specific things. Some are more about just resting and being with
whatever is arising. In the last module, we talked about all these
different mental qualities. What I'd recommend is even just two minutes can go
a long way with meditation. Just sitting down and we focusing on your breath
for two minutes, really make a big impact
on the rest of the day. Recommendation number six,
the final recommendation for the morning routine is
finding some way to move. And this can be part of a
formal exercise program. Maybe you decided to go
on a run a few times a week or do some more
formal sports activity. Just finding ways to get the
blood pumping in the body, to move the body is
going to be really beneficial for that morning
energizing your state, shifting your state into that
kind of powerful stance. That is the final recommendation for the morning
routine practice. Now, all of the steps
I've talked about, all of that morning
routine juiciness can be done in less
than 20 minutes. There's really no excuse
that you don't have time for a morning
routine practice. You can always wake up
a little bit earlier. But it's just about
being committed, being disciplined enough to actually do these
different things. My recommendation is to do a
small enough amount of each of those where you feel like you can do it
consistently each day. For you, it might look
like just picking one or two of those
things I've mentioned. And using those for
your morning routine, consistency is much
more important than the overall depth that you do in these morning
routine things. First, you just want to focus on getting it so that you're
doing it every day. Here's your homework. Get started on your morning routine practice
tomorrow morning. What you want to do right
now is make a plan. What is your morning
routine going to be? What's your start-up
sequence and then what is your morning
routine include? Then tomorrow you
can get started. That's it for the
lecture on building a powerful and consistent
morning routine. In the next video, we're
gonna talk about how to best activate
your other habits, your other goals that you have. We're gonna be looking
at something called behavioral architecture. Don't miss it and I'll see
you in the next video.
27. 3.3 - Behavioral Architecture: And now, back in the old days, it used to be thought that habit change was all
about self-control. That you just needed to
toughen up and be stronger. And that if you couldn't
change your habits, if you gave into temptation, it meant that you were just weak willed or not determined enough. For what we know now
is that habit change is much less about this
quality of self-control, much more about what we
might call a stimulus control or behavioral
architecture. Now what does that
mean, stimulus control and behavioral
architecture. What it means is
that the environment that we find ourselves in, or rather the environment
that we often put ourselves in has a big influence on whether or not
we choose to eat that extra cookie or watch
that extra episode on Netflix, or spent another four hours
watching **** online. That the environment actually plays a key role in our ability to choose healthy habits or to get sucked into
unhealthy habits. So here's a simple but easy
to understand example. Let's say that you're
trying to lose weight and eat healthier. One of the things that
you struggle with is eating donuts or pastries. Now, if you decide to
take the route to work each day that passes you directly in front of
that doughnut shop. And every day you have
to walk by and see those delicious looking
donuts in the window, you're going to be
much more likely to cave in and go and
eat those donuts. And the person who
chooses the route to work that doesn't pass them
by those doughnut shops. Or another example, let's say you're trying to
quit watching ****. But on your Instagram feed, all of the people you follow, our bikini clad
Instagram influencers. And every time you
open up the app, you're basically
seeing these things that trigger your list. Again, it's gonna be much
harder to quit watching **** if that's what you're feeding your attention
every few minutes. Now the good news is that we can use this to our advantage. We can actually
switch that example. Let's say you're trying to improve your fitness
and run more often. If you put your running shoes
and your workout clothes just next to your bed so that every morning
when you wake up, it's much easier to just put
on your workout clothes. That's going to help cultivate that healthy habit
of running in the morning. Let's say you want
to eat healthier. If you stock your
fridge full of carrots and celery and things that
are healthy to consume. When you open the fridge again, it's gonna be easy to make that choice with
the healthy option. And this is where that term behavioral
architecture comes in. We can actually be the architects of our
environment to help enable healthier behaviors and help to diminish our
unhealthy behaviors. We can set ourselves up
for success by the things we put around us and by the things we don't
put around ourselves. How do you actually do this? Let's very simple. First is just to notice
anything that triggers your unhealthy or unwholesome
habits or behaviors, whether it's ****
or social media. Finding out what
triggers that and removing as much of that from your environment
as possible. Removing those stimulants,
those triggers. The next step is to
figure out what are the healthy habits you
want to cultivate. And putting things in place that make those habits easier, that removes the friction
to completing those habits. When it comes to cultivating a healthier
relationship with social media and **** or maybe stopping your use
of those altogether. I have a few recommendations. The first is to remove
all of the social media apps and all of the web
browsers from your phone. You can still use social
media on your computer, but just the act of
removing it from your phone already pulls away a lot
of those stimulants, a lot of those triggers when
you might be looking at it, just standing in line or when you're walking
down the street. Another helpful tip is to move around the
furniture in your home. This might sound strange, but there's something
about the act of just having a different environment, a different feeling
of where you are at that enables you to start fresh, to feel like you're
not in the same, stuck in the same rights
that can the same routines. So try moving around
your furniture and getting that fresh
start for your mind. The third is to not sleep with
any tech in your bedroom. This is something I
mentioned earlier, but again, this goes so far. Leave your phone outside
of your bedroom, leave your computer
outside of your bedroom. Again, it just provides
that extra level of stimulus that trigger
when you're in bed, you have your phone, it leads to bad things. So leave your phone
outside your room, leave your computer
outside your room. And that's going to
help out quite a lot. Then finally, if you're
keeping social media and just trying to have a
healthier relationship to it. I'd recommend unfollowing
any people that either trigger your **** or
trigger your comparison. Any people that are not
making you feel uplifted. There might be accounts you can unfollow accounts
that are no longer serving you in your life
that aren't leading you to wanting to make
your life better. So don't be afraid
to unfollow people. So take some time right now
and just think about what are the things that you can
do in your environment? How can you be the architect of your own environment to set
yourself up for success? So now that we have a
solid understanding of what actually leads
to habit change, what is really helpful? We can next look at
what are called the three phases of habit change. So you have a roadmap
and understanding of what are the different
phases you'll be going through on this journey. So head on over to
that next section. I'll see you there.
28. 3.4 - The 3 Phases of Habit Change: Now as you begin to think about starting to
change your habits, it may be as introducing
a 30-day digital detox. Or maybe it's just changing your relationship to your
phone and using it less. Whatever it is that you're
thinking of committing to, thinking of changing
in your life. It's important to understand
what are called the three phases of habit change. These three phases that
we're gonna cover really applied to any meaningful change you want to bring
into your life. And when I seeing
meaningful, I mean, it's gonna be something
that you are going to face some resistance in
any meaningful change. Anything that's going to
actually make an impact on your life is going to have some resistance
somewhere in there. Now the three phases of habit
change is something that I picked up from the book
organized tomorrow, today by Jason silk
and Tom Barto. If you're interested in this
topic and you want to go deeper into it and definitely
check out that book. What is it a three phases. The first phase is known
as the honeymoon phase. This is when everything is
new and fresh and exciting. Your motivation is high. You're able to accomplish the tasks on a day-to-day basis that you set out for yourself. You just kinda feeling
good about the change and everything feels
easy and flowing. This usually happens
in the beginning, first few days, maybe
the first few weeks. That first honeymoon phase
where it's all going smoothly. The second phase of habit
change is what we call the fight through phase or
the fight through stage. This is where you start
to have these moments where maybe you wake up and
you just have that thought. Maybe I'll skip one day or what's the problem if I
cheat just a little bit? Or maybe pass on it today and I'll just
get back on it tomorrow. It's when these moments
come up where you start to slip back into the
old habit or behavior. This is known as the
fight through stage, because you actually
have to fight through these moments in order
to stay consistent. Now, in the fight through stage, there's good news and
there's bad news. The bad news is that if you
lose a fight through moment, let's say you have one of these thoughts of
what's the big deal if I just cheat a little bit and you lose that
fight through moment. What's going to happen
is the next fight for a moment is going to
be harder to win. It's gonna be harder to
actually stay consistent with that habit because you will already have broken
it and you think, well, I broke it a few minutes
ago or a few hours ago. What's the problem
if I break it again? So each time you lose
a fight through, the next one gets harder. The good news is that
every time you win a fight through every moment where you have one of these thoughts and you say, You know what? I'm going to stick
with my habit. The next one you face
is going to be easier. You're going to get
more and more skill with winning this
fight through periods. If you can learn how to get through your fight
through moments on a consistent basis
and allows you to get to phase three
of habit change, which is second nature phase. Second nature phase
is when you no longer have to think
about what you're doing, you no longer have to put
effort into the process. You simply do it like
a second nature. Like it's part of what
you've always done. For many of us,
brushing our teeth, we are now in the
second nature phase. With that. We do it every day, maybe twice a day. And we just kind of feel
weird if we don't do it. If you've missed brushing your teeth in the
morning or the evening, you feel a little bit gross
for like something's off. This is second nature phase. As you try to change your habits and behaviors around
your technology. Whether it's stopping
yourself from watching **** or getting off of social media, we're just using it less. It's going to be really helpful to have this understanding, this framework of the three
phases of habit change. To know when you're in
that honeymoon stage, to know when you're in
a fight through period, and to see how to get to
that second nature phase. Now that we have an
understanding of the roadmap of
changing our habits, the next video
we're going to look at what do we do when we're in the midst of one of those
fight through periods. What are some things we can
do when we're dealing with strong urges or desires. And how do we cultivate some self-management
in those areas? When our behavioral
architecture has failed us, when we're in the midst of that strong impulse
or desire to act out. So head on over to the
next video where we're going to talk about how
to deal with urges.
29. 3.5 - Dealing with Urges: Now hopefully by this
time you've done enough of the foundational work. Things like creating a
compelling vision of the future and setting up your
environment and doing that behavioral architecture
and stimulus control. And then also cultivating these strong mental foundations. Hopefully you've done enough of the foundational work where overall you're experiencing
less craving in your life. Now that being said, there
are still going to be moments where craving pops up, where you have
these fight through moments where the urge, the temptation to act
out against your values, against your better
wishes still arises. In this video, we're gonna
talk about what do you do when those
strong urges arise? What do you do when you have that strong compulsive feeling
to reach for the phone, to reach for the computer
to act out in some way. I'll be covering five
basic strategies you can use for dealing with urges
whenever they arise. The first strategy for
dealing with urges is to use the power
of investigation. Here what you want to do
is use that technique we talked about earlier
of labeling or noting. Whenever an urge arises to
simply notice it and note it. Give it that label of, Oh, maybe it's ****. Maybe it is craving, maybe it is restlessness. Just kinda notice what's
present in that moment. Little bonus here is
that see if you can watch the urge for
about 90 seconds. There were some interesting
research that was done that shows that
the majority of emotions only last for 90
seconds unless we feed them. If you don't feed an emotion, it should dissipate
after about 90 seconds. What I'd like to
recommend is if you notice that strong
compulsive feeling to act, set a timer for 90 seconds and just do some mindful observing of your body and your feelings and then see
what happens after 90 seconds. Oftentimes you'll find
that the emotion, the feeling has passed away and you no longer feel
the need to act out. Second strategy you can employ
is to change your state, to change the state
of your body, changed the state of your mind. And my favorite tools for this are our good old friends,
push-ups and squats. So wherever you are, you can always do five
push-ups or ten push-ups. You can always do
five or ten squats. Just that act of moving your
body, changing the state, getting the blood pumping often will make a
craving go away. Strategy number three
for how to deal with urges and temptations
is to call a friend. Here. It doesn't have to
be something where you're calling them
unnecessarily saying, Hey, I'm trying to deal
with a strong urge to watch **** or to get
back on social media. You can just call them to
chat and just say, Hey, just wanted to see how you're doing or ask them a question. You can also make it an
accountability buddy. If you feel open, if you feel vulnerable enough
to share that with them, you can let them
know what's going on and that you're
using them as a way to just kind of let an urge or a feeling
pass through you. But calling a friend
is a really great way to kind of change
your state mentally. The fourth strategy is to reconnect with the
envisioning practices. You can either connect with that default future
vision and say, where am I headed if I
keep giving into this? Or you can connect with the
dream future vision and say, what's really important to me? Where do I want to get to and is this thing going to get
me where I want to go? Sometimes just the
act of connecting with those different
possibilities can give you that perspective and
give you the motivation that you need to hold
out a little longer. Strategy number five, and this
one I love to talk about, which is if all else
fails and you just can't resist it any longer to
do the act, whatever it is, whether it's watching
**** or getting on social media or eating
that junk food, whatever it is you're trying to resist to allow
yourself to do it, but to do it with mindfulness, to really pay attention to how you're feeling as
you're doing it, each step of the way. As you open up your computer, as you do whatever it is, really be aware of the
different emotions, the feelings in the body. Often this is the most
sustainable route to habit change because you start to see how the thing
really makes you feel. It's like putting
your hand in a fire. You don't really put your hand in the fire
and need to think about this is hot and what
are the pros and cons? When you put your hand in
the fire and new experience, the heat, you automatically
pull your handout. And it's the same way
with being aware of the different emotions and feelings of doing
whatever habit you know, is not good for you. When you really see
how it affects you. Your body naturally will
start to pull away from it. You start to be less attached to that habit
or that activity. So that's the fifth and final strategy for dealing with urges, which is to just
do the thing but really pay attention
as you do it. Those are the five
strategies for dealing with urges,
dealing with temptation. In the next video, we're going to talk about
the final thing that breaks us down when it comes to changing habits,
changing behaviors. This is the saboteur. So we're gonna look at how do we deal with the Sabbath tour. What does that all about? So I'll see you in
the next video.
30. 3.6 - Dealing with the Saboteur: If you're going to be successful on this self
transformation journey, you've got to understand
who your biggest enemy is. Your biggest enemy is
the enemy from within, that you are your
own greatest source of sabotage and resistance. One of the ways that
this battle is going to manifest is with what's
called the saboteur. The Salvador has
many other names. Sometimes he's called
the inner critic. Sometimes he's called the judge. In the Buddhist tradition
and the name is Mara. Sometimes it's called
resistance and this will show up in many different
ways in your life. It might be procrastination
or self judgment, might be fear and anxiety, might be victimhood or
blaming other people. There are many
different ways that the saboteurs is
going to show up. But ultimately the saboteur is there to keep you in
the comfort zone, to keep you away from growth. Whenever you try to
make a big change to improve your life, the saboteur is there
to keep you stuck, to keep you in that
stagnant place. I want to say a few words on how to deal with the cyber tour. How do you deal with
this self-sabotage that's going to show
up in this journey. The first thing that's
important to know about the saboteur is to recognize that the intentions
behind the saboteur or actually good intentions. The saboteur evolved as this evolutionary
mechanism that was there to try to keep you
safe from harm. For example, think
about self judgment or self-criticism that evolved as a way to try to keep you safe from being
excluded from the tribe. It says, Okay, how
can we make ourselves better so that we aren't going to be
kicked out of the trie. We're not going to be left out so that we're not
going to die alone. Whenever I recognize the
saboteur showing up in my life, I like to just
turn to it and say thank you for trying
to keep me safe. But I need to do
something else right now. It's this act of acknowledging. You're trying to keep me safe
and you're just misguided. Another way to work
with the saboteur or self-sabotage is simply
to notice and label it. Again, this goes
back to that power of investigation of labeling. But when we see
the Sabbath tour, when we see it happening
and we just say, Oh, I see You, then it will not have
as much power over us. Often the saboteur is most effective when it's
working behind the scenes. So again, whenever you
see it showing up, just give it that soft label. The Salvatore is here
trying to hold me back. The third thing you can do with the saboteur is when you
notice the saboteurs speaking, you'd be saying these
thoughts in your head. You can turn to the other voice in your head and you can ask, what would the inner
CEO have to say? What is the voice of
wisdom have to say. Sometimes it's helpful to have
a kind of inner committee. You've got different people, different voices in your head. And you can check in
with different people. You can say, okay, this avatar has this to say. What does my inner
CEO have to say? Sometimes you don't
have an inner CEO, but you can connect with the image or idea of
a mentor or a coach. You can say, okay, what
would the Dalai Lama say to the Saturday
tour right now? Or what would my
mentor, I have to say? Some way of connecting with
a different perspective. A different voice can bring some clarity
to the situation. But most of all, when you notice
that the saboteurs present to see if you
can be kind to yourself, to see if you can
not judge yourself, not blame yourself, but simply be gentle and
keep moving forward knowing that the Sabbath
tour and self-sabotage and inner critic and visits everyone to know that
you're not alone. And to keep moving forward.
31. 3.7 - Module Wrap-Up: Great work on completing this module of activating
your habits and routines. We've looked at a few
different things you can implement and integrate. Powerful morning
routine, different ways to set yourself
up for success, and then how to deal with
self-sabotage and some of the things like roadblocks and resistance that's gonna
show up along the way. In the next module, we're gonna look at deepening on this journey to real inner
fulfillment and inner peace. What are the things that
are going to bring us, the happiness that we seek? We've looked at what
do we want to get rid of? Where do we want to go? Then what's going to take us to that deeper level of inner
fulfillment and inner peace. I'll see you in
that next module.
32. 4.1 - The Ultimate Goal: Welcome to the fourth
and final module of the unhooked course, breaking through to
deeper fulfillment. So let's start with a question. Why are you here? I mean, why you really hear? What's the deeper
point of trying to break free from your
digital addiction? At the heart of most people's
goals and aspirations lies a deep desire
for real happiness, for inner peace and well-being. I know that this is what got
me started on this journey of self-mastery and
meditation and mindfulness. My guess is that it's what
brought you here as well, is that yearning
for a deeper life, more fulfilling and
satisfying life. Happiness is said
to be that one goal that we pursue for its own sake. In this module, we're gonna be looking at what are
some of the things that we can focus on and cultivate to tap into that deeper
sense of fulfillment, real happiness in life. If you're thinking, Jeremy, I don't really need this module. I'm just here to break free
from my tech addiction. Well, think again. Why do you think that tech addiction formed in
the first place? All the addictions we have, whether they're
tech addictions or drug addiction or
substance addictions? Form because there's some fundamental unmet
need in our life. There's some underlying pain or suffering that's going on. And we're using this
addiction as a way to cover up that pain, that suffering in our life. So until you tackle
that problem of deeper discontent
or dissatisfaction, these addictive patterns, these addictive
behaviors are gonna continue popping
up in your life. Even if you're able to squash one addictive habit
through brute force. Another one is just going
to pop up somewhere else. This is why we need to cultivate this deeper,
more fulfilling life. In this course, we're focused
on long-term recovery, real freedom from addictive
habits and behaviors. Our goal here is
to help you create a life that doesn't need
any form of addiction. A life that we don't need
to distract ourselves from. In this module, I'll be covering the five important pillars of a deeply fulfilling
and happy life.
33. 4.2 - Solitude: Now there's a quote that I
love from Blaise Pascal, who was a French mathematician and philosopher and theologian. He says this, all of
humanity's problems stem from man's inability to
sit quietly in a room alone. Now that might sound like
an exaggeration to say that all of humanity's problems
stem from this issue. But you could probably make
a strong argument that a lot of the suffering
that exists in the world, a lot of the violence that exists in the world
is because of this inability to fundamentally
be alone with ourselves. It's that Each that a lot of us feel to need to be going out and achieving and conquering and owning and doing
all this stuff. As opposed to being able to
sit quietly in a room alone. That fundamental
tendency of the mind, of the human spirit that
wants to go out and conquer and own and achieve
causes a lot of suffering. Now, regardless of the
outer consequences of this human tendency, hopefully you can
see that there's a direct link between
this tendency, this inability to sit
quietly in a room alone, and our inner consequences, our inner suffering
that we experience. This is what tech addiction
most of the years is that inability to be
with our own thoughts. And so this leads us to the importance of cultivating
what we call solitude. The importance of being able to be alone
with your thoughts. If we truly want inner peace, we have to learn
how to be still, how to not be jumping from
distraction to distraction, from Escape to escape, to dive into this, I really like the
concept of solitude as illustrated are described by Cal Newport in his book
digital minimalism. The way he described
solitude is that it's the absence of input
from other minds. We can see that it's
not about finding a quiet place where nothing's
going to disturb you. It's about what you're
letting into your mind. Often we might be in a
quiet place, but it's, we're bringing in podcasts
and news and social media and distractions of
all sorts that are interrupting our ability
to find that solitude. Solitude so important. I'll mention three reasons here, but there are undoubtedly more benefits to
cultivating solitude. The first reason that
solitude is important is that it's essential for
self-awareness. If you want to know yourself
on a fundamental level, you have to take
the time to look within most of our attention, most of the day is
looking outward. We're looking at news sites and Netflix and YouTube and work and e-mails and all
these things that are pulling us away
from ourselves. If you want to cultivate that healthy relationship
with yourself, if you want to know
yourself on a deep level, it starts with cultivating
time for solitude. Your relationship
with yourself is the most important relationship. You will ever have. This spending time of cultivating a relationship
with yourself, of healing that
relationship with yourself is really important. The second benefit, solitude, is that it helps us and break the cycle of addiction
to distraction. Again, so often
we're just jumping from one distraction
to the next. With solitude, we are
actively swimming upstream. We're going against the
current to learn how to be comfortable with just being present with whatever is
arising in the moment. The more we do this, we can start to
remember what it's like to not be so connected, not be so distracted. Many of us, if we're old enough, remember a time in
our childhood where we weren't so connected
to our devices, we weren't so distracted. And remembering what that
feels like is empowering. The third major benefit is that mastering the art of
being alone gives you more power and more ability to be with other people in a
real and meaningful way. That if you can
learn how to be with yourself regardless of
what's coming up for you. If you can learn how to
be with yourself and not run away from
what's difficult. It gives you more
strength to be with others in their
difficult moments. How do we make
time for solitude? What are some healthy
forms of solitude? I'll be listening
five different forms that you can practice. But there are many others. Number one is meditation. In this can be as
simple as sitting down for a minute or two
minutes and doing nothing. But just that act of
stopping what you're doing, being with yourself, your
thoughts and your breath. This is a great way
to practice solitude. Number two is going
for a phone list, walk, or going for a hike. But some way of getting
out and moving, being out in nature, getting some sunlight
and fresh air. But importantly,
without your phone, without listening to a
podcast or an audio book, which is being out there by yourself without that
input from other people. Number three is journaling. Journaling is a great way to
practice solitude because it's about exploring what's
going on in your inner world. Again, it's, there's no
input from other people. It's about you exploring
your own inner space, your own emotional world. Taking some time to journal
in the mornings or on a regular basis is a great
way to tap into solitude. Number four is to do household
chores without podcasts, without audio books,
without music. But just to do these
daily routines like washing the dishes and being mindful while
you're doing them. Another great way to
find that solitude. The fifth one offer is to
simply sit on your porch or a balcony or on public bench and just
watch the world go by. This is a great way to slow down and to just be with
whatever is arising. Again, no agenda, just sitting, just watching the world go by. So those are my tips on bringing more solitude
into your life. Again, to help you tap
into this deeper aspect, not running around, not having
your mind so scattered, but learning how to be still had to be present
for what's happening. To wrap up this section, I'll leave you with
a quote that I love. And this comes from
Henri knowing. He says this, to live
a spiritual life, we must first find
the courage to enter into the desert
of our loneliness and change it by gentle
and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude that covers it for the first pillar of happiness,
all about solitude. In the next video, we'll
look at the second pillar, which is all about
living an ethical life. I'll see you there.
34. 4.3 - Ethics: When I think of my own life, often what causes me
the most pain and suffering is remembering
the times in my life, what I have acted unskillfully, where I've caused harm to other people through my actions. Whether it was through greed or anger or hatred or
just my own delusion. The times where I have the most restless
and sleepless nights are those times when I'm remembering the things that I've done that I've
heard other people. On the flip side of this, the times where I sleep
most peacefully or those days where I know that I haven't done anything wrong. And that I've been
living in alignment with an ethical system, with an ethical framework of
practicing nonviolence and non-harm and not living out of greed or anger or delusion. In the Buddhist tradition, we have a phrase for this. It's called the bliss
of blameless business. In a sense, there is a certain kind of bliss
or a certain kind of inner peace that
we can experience when we know that we're
living in a blameless way. One, we know that
we're not causing harm to other people or not acting greedily or taking what has not
been offered to us. That we can experience
that sense of inner peace, that ease of mind without
regret or remorse. And this is really related
to that concept of ethics. Living in an ethical way to get a sense of the
importance of ethics, it's okay at one of
my favorite quotes. And this comes from a teacher named Anna Guernica Menander. He says something along
the lines of this. He said, trying to gain spiritual insights
without a grounding in moral action is like
trying to row a boat across a river without first
and tying it from the dock. In other words, you can do all the self-mastery
work in the world. You can achieve all your
goals and aspirations. You can earn a
million dollars and you can be on top of the world. But if you're living
in an unethical way, you're never going to find
that sense of inner peace, that balance in the
heart and mind. So how can we live
more ethically? Well, it helps to have some
sort of external framework, some sort of moral
principles that you live by. And they don't have
to be religious. Necessarily if you come from
a religion and there is a set of moral principles
or ethical guidelines, and they work for you. Then feel free to follow that. In this video, I'll be offering the ethical principles
of Buddhism, which for me are very
secular approach to ethics. There's nothing you
need to believe in. There's no higher power you
need to believe in for these. It's really just an ethical
framework for how to live. The framework for ethics
in Buddhism are called the five training precepts are the five ethical
training presets. The first is to undertake the training to not
harm any living being. In other words,
this means to not kill and not hurt anything
that has sentience, anything that can feel pain. The second precept is around not engaging in false
or divisive speech. In other words, not
lying, not gossiping, not using your words in a way to harm others or divide others. The third is to not take what has not been freely offered. This is a fancy way of saying to not steal things
that aren't yours, but to not take what has
not been freely offered. If it hasn't been given to you, it hasn't been offered
to you to not take it. The fourth is to not
take in toxicants that cloud the mind or
lead to heedlessness. In other words, this one
is around not taking drugs or alcohol or things that cloud the mind that lead you to do unwholesome
or unskillful things. The fifth is to not engage
in sexual misconduct. What this one means
is to not harm other people with
your sexual energy. It's not about celibacy, It's not about avoiding
sexual contact. But it's about saying, how are you using
your sexual energy in or you harming others
with that energy. Now these five ethical training
precepts should not be seen like commandments or
things that if you do, it means you're a bad person. Instead, they should
be guidelines. They should be seen more
like stairways to happiness. The more that you
can follow these, the more that you can
live in this ethical way, the happier you are
going to become. So it's not to say that you have to be perfect
in any of these, but it's to assess your
life and see where are you living out of
alignment with some of these ethical principles. So maybe it takes some
time right now and just assess your life and assess
the way you're living. And maybe look at these five different ethical
training precepts and ask yourself, where can I live more ethically? Or how can I bring more ethical practices into
my life, right, Great job. So that is it on ethics. Next up we're going to be diving into the third
pillar of happiness, which is all about playtime. I'll see you in the next video.
35. 4.4 - Play: Now, I firmly believe that a good life is a life
that you enjoy living. One of the best ways to enjoy your life is to
have more playtime. You might be thinking that
play is just for kids, that adults, you shouldn't
be playing around. But adults need played
just as much as kids do. And the more you bring
play into your life, the better off
you're going to be both mentally and physically. What do I mean by play? I mean finding hobbies
or activities or engagements that are
putting you into a state of either flow or fun. Let's dive into these
two different topics. Fun is obvious. When you're goofing off,
you're being silly. You're laughing with friends. You're at ease and
playful in your heart. This is what I mean by fun. The second is getting
into a state of flow. Flow is a state of peak or optimal performance that you are fully engaged in the
activity that you're doing. This has been studied by the researcher Mihai
cheeks sent me high. And it is often described
as being in the zone. It's that state where
time is just flying by. You're not really aware
of yourself anymore because you're so
engaged in the activity. Some common examples of
this are playing sports, doing mathematics, computer programming,
playing video games. All of these things where it's challenging but it meets
your skill level as well. So there's that sweet
spot where it's something that's challenges you, but it also requires some skill and your skill
is there to match it. Both of these are important. Fun is something that we used to do a lot
when we were kids. Hopefully you can imagine
what it was like to just play tag with your friends in how much joy you can
bring into your life, just from running around in circles and trying
to tag your friend. Flow is also important
because it drops us into that state of letting go of
the stories of ourselves. We're not so concerned
about what people are thinking about us or what
we think about ourselves. We just fully engaged in the
activity that we're doing. This can bring a
certain sense of vitality or energy to your life. We need to find ways
to bring both of these back into our lives. Your homework is to simply
reflect on these questions. The first question is this, what activities and bring
me into a state of flow? Think about what are
the activities that you do or you'd like to do that, you know, will bring you
into that flow state. Or what are some
activities that you want to get into that you feel like are going to be able to bring you
into the flow state. The second question is, where can I be more
playful in my life? Where can I be more
playful in my life? Thinking about what areas, what people you might be able
to be more playful with. What are some activities
you can do where you can be goofy or silly or
let go a little bit. Thinking about that question. The final question is, where can I bring more
laughter into my life? So thinking about ways where
you normally find laughter. Maybe it's watching
stand-up comedy, or going to an event with your friends or
playing board games. Finding ways where you can bring more laughter into your life. All right, once you're done
with those reflections, you can head on over
to the next section. We're gonna talk about the
next pillar of happiness. All about generosity. I'll see you in the next video.
36. 4.5 - Generosity: Now the third pillar of a deeply fulfilling life
is to practice generosity. Why is generosity such
an important part of cultivating a
fulfilling or happy life? There are three reasons. The first reason
is that there is no special training required back in the ancient
time of the Buddha. Generosity was known as the
fastest path to happiness. It was the simplest
and most direct way of bringing more happiness
and well-being into life. Why is this the case? Well, with generosity, There's no special training involved. You don't need to become a master practitioner
of generosity. It's very simple,
it's very direct. Unlike something like
meditation where you really need to
train for a while, you need to learn the basics, you need to build up your
skill in that practice. With generosity,
It's very simple. That's the first reason why generosity is a fast
path to happiness. The second reason is that it
brings immediate results. Generosity. You experience the joy, the lightness of heart, the moment that you practice it, the moment you give
something to someone, in a moment that you help
someone in some way, you experience that joy. And it's not just in the moment that you
experienced the joy. There's actually three
different times where you experience the happiness
of generosity. The first is in reflecting on thinking about
practicing generosity, you will experience
happiness when you buy a gift for someone and you're planning to
give it to them, just thinking about the act of giving it to them
will make you happy. Then the second time is
when you give that gift, you experienced that
joy in the moment. And then the third
time is when you're reflecting on the
act of having given. Thinking about a, an
act of generosity from the past also brings
happiness to the mind, also brings joy to your life. So thinking about that gift
that you gave your friend or family member and the happiness of brought to them
will make you happy. Those are the three different
times that happiness brings immediate gladness
and joy to the mind. The third reason
that generosity is a fast-track to happiness
is that it begins to unravel the forces of
craving or greed in the mind. Especially for you
in this course, we're here talking about
tech addictions and craving and desire and all the suffering
that, that can bring. Generosity is the
direct antidote to those forces in the mind. The forces that
says, I want this, I must have this, I need more of this. The direct antidote is to
give some of that away. When you experience still being happy, still
being content, and still being even better
than you were before, after having released
your possessions. It begins to unravel the
forces of craving in the mind that is a direct leading to greater
happiness in your life. This emphasis on generosity as a path factor for happiness
is also supported by science. There was a really interesting
study or series of studies that showed
that when you spend your money
on other people, it makes you happier
than if you were to spend that same amount
of money on yourself. Let's say you have
an extra $20 or €20. If you spend that money on someone else to
actually makes you happier than if you were
to spend it on yourself. This is counter-intuitive
to how most of us behave. We typically go out thinking, I'm gonna buy something for myself and that
will make me happy. What we don't realize
is that if it was happiness we were after, we would actually be wiser to spend that
money on someone else. When we talk about generosity, it's not just giving up your material possessions
to other people. It can also be giving your
time and attention as well. We don't have to
necessarily give a gift or a physical and
material object. You can also just be
spending time with someone or giving your full
attention to someone, as opposed to listening while you're checking your
Instagram feed. Generosity can take many forms. Now I'm not recommending that you give up all
your possessions, that you give away
all your things and become a renunciation monk. But what I am suggesting
is that you try practicing small random acts of kindness or random acts of generosity
in your day-to-day life. Some examples of this could
be something like holding the door for someone or
buying a coffee for a friend, or giving money to a homeless
person on the street, or perhaps donating to a
cause that you believe in. One of my meditation teachers, his name is Joseph
Goldstein and he has a deep generosity practice and his practice
looks like this. Whenever he has the thought
to give something to someone, whenever that thought arises
in the mind, he does it. So if he thinks, Oh, maybe I should give
this to this person, then he follows through on that. He does this before
his mind starts to make up different
excuses around well, maybe I'll need this later or what if I don't have enough? Whenever that impulse
arises, he acts on it. And he is one of the
happiest people that I know. He must be doing
something right? So your homework for
today is to try and practice one moment
of generosity today. Whether it's with a friend or a stranger or a family member. Seeing if you can
practice that gift of giving, releasing
the greediness, releasing the sense
of possessiveness around your things in your
possessions and saying, oh, how can I help someone? How can I give something to someone that will
improve their life? So try this out and
you will experience the joy that comes from
practicing generosity. Great work on finishing up
this section on generosity. Head on over to the next video
where we're going to talk about the final
pillar of happiness, which is all about
community and connection.
37. 4.6 - Community: So welcome to the fifth and
final pillar of happiness, which is all about
community and connection. There's a beautiful story from the Buddhist tradition around
the value of community. In the time of the Buddha, there was a young
monk named Ananda. Ananda was the cousin of the Buddha and also his
personal attendant. One day Ananda was sitting in meditation and came
upon a deep insight. He went running to the
Buddha and he said, I have discovered something really important,
some deep insight. I've discovered
that community and spiritual friendship must be a full half of the
spiritual life. The Buddha looked at him
and he said, not so Ananda, not so community in the spiritual friendships is
all of the spiritual life. I love this analogy, I love this story because it
reminds us that many of us recognize how important
friendships and community is. But we don't realize
how important it is. That as this story illustrates, it's the whole of
the spiritual life is in how we're relating
with our community. Water are our
relationships like now, you can disagree with this
all you like and that's fine. There's room for disagreement. But I think what's important
to take away from this is that outside of the context of how you are
with other people, none of this really matters. You can do all the
self-improvement work. You can do all this
self-mastery and make a million dollars and get a six pack and do
all of that stuff. But if you're not living in
harmony with other people, if you don't have
deep connections and relationships with other people, it's not going to
mean anything that real spiritual
practice is not about how long you can
sit in meditation or how deeply you can
focus on your breath. It's about how do you treat
the people in your life? How do you treat the strangers that you meet on a
day-to-day basis? And how do you treat yourself? This is backed by
science as well. In the Harvard Study
of Adult Development, one of the most comprehensive
longitudinal studies ever looked at what are
the factors that lead to overall happiness in life? What they found is that one of the most important things was our relationship with others. So people who have
deep relationships, whether with a significant
other or deep connections with friends and family. Those were the happiest
people long-term. There was another set of studies and other
study that looked at how taking care
of someone else, whether it's a significant
other or a pet, or even having a
plant to take care of increased your lifespan. Now how crazy is that just having someone else to care for? Increased how long you live. So having this
connection with others, having a sense of community is one of the most
important things we can focus on when it comes to cultivating a deeply
fulfilling life, a life that doesn't need
distraction and addiction, and zoning out by
numbing ourselves. On the flip side of this, we're witnessing an epidemic of loneliness and isolation
in our society. It seems the more connected
we become on social media, the more connected we become through the Internet
and our devices, the less connected we are with other people
in the real-world. So two questions that
you can reflect on. The first is, how can you nurture the relationships
that are important to you? How can you nurture the relationships that
are important to you? The second question is, how can you be more present
with the people in your life? So a lot of us have this
tendency to be distracted. We're checking our
phones and e-mail even when we're
with other people. So the question is,
how can you be more present with the people in
your life who you care about? Sometimes we need
to take a good look at who we're letting
into our life as well. We might need to actually
break up with a friend or put some boundaries in
place with a family member. There's this quote that
I like to reflect on, which is an average of the five people you spend
the most time with. Thinking clearly about who are you letting into your life? What are the influence that
they're having on your life? And you might come to
the realization of the conclusion that there
are certain people or places where you need to put up some boundaries or
breakup with a friend. Now when you put a
boundaries with someone, it doesn't mean that you
stopped loving them, but it means that you
protect your own energy, you protect your own space. This next question to reflect
on or journal about is, is there anyone that
you need to let go of or any one you need to set some boundaries with doing some journaling on that
and really diving in. Is there anywhere you need
to set up some boundaries? And finally, one last
question to reflect on what is one
thing you can do to nurture and important
relationship this week might be as
simple as reaching out to a friend who you haven't
talked to in awhile or baby making time for someone who
you've been meaning to. Thinking what is
one thing you can do to nurture and
important relationship. So those are some reflections on community and connection and their importance in cultivating a more fulfilling and
deeply satisfying life. So head on over
to the next video where we're going to
wrap up this module.
38. 4.7 - Module and Course Wrap-Up: Congratulations on making it to the end of the unhooked course. Let's take a moment
just to recap where we've been in
the different modules. In module one, we took a look at envisioning and we saw
the default future. Looking at where are we headed? If we don't make a change, then we figured out where
do we want to go in life? What's really important to us? We looked at values
and aspirations. We also looked at
how to set goals. And finally, we
understood the importance of taking ownership in our life. In module two, we
looked at building a strong mental foundation, realizing that all of
our problems start in the mind and that our solution
lies in the mind as well. We looked at how we
can train the mind for greater clarity, for
greater concentration, for more self-control,
more self-compassion, and finally, cultivating
contentment and gratitude. In Module three, we
looked more closely at a habit change in the
science of habits. Starting with the body
and figuring out what are the best ways to take care of the body and build that
strong foundation. Then we moved onto building
a powerful morning routine. We looked at behavioral
architecture and stimulus control. The three phases of habit change hadn't deal
with urges when they arise. And finally, how to
overcome self-sabotage. In module four, the last module, we looked at creating a more deeply fulfilling
and happy life. We explore the five pillars of deeper fulfillment, solitude, ethical living,
Finding flow and fun, generosity, and finally,
community and connection. Now you have all the
understanding that you need to set up a live
free from addiction. The question now is how will you take action on
what you've learned? Here's my recommendation
is to find the time to do a 30-day digital
detox or digital reset. I feel that this is
important because it's very useful to experience what it's like to be free from
things like social media and **** and all the digital
distractions that we use. It doesn't have to be
a lifelong commitment, but at least experiencing what it's like to be free
from it for 30 days. We'll give you that clarity
to know what do you want to keep in your life for this
30-day digital detox, I recommend doing a full detox. What I mean by that is getting rid of all of your social media, all of your digital distractions for that full 30-day period. If you're addicted to Instagram, if you just get
rid of Instagram, but you keep all your
other digital addictions, then you're likely going to just transfer that energy over
into something else. So maybe you spend less
time on Instagram. It you might just
start watching Netflix more as a way to
make up the space. So a full digital
detox is where you get all of it out completely and spend that 30 days
remembering what it's like to be disconnected,
be unhooked. If you can do this
in the context of maybe a meditation retreat or spending this time getting connected to these hobbies
that are more engaging, where you're finding
your flow and your fun. Finding ways to use that 30 days productively and reconnect
with what's important. What's gonna bring you
real happiness in life. For great description on how to do a 30-day digital detox. I recommend checking
out the book digital minimalism
by Cal Newport. It's one of my favorite
on the subjects. Really useful way to
understand the ins and outs of that digital
detox experience. I hope this has
all been helpful. I hope you've enjoyed
this course and I look forward to seeing your
success in this journey. Don't hesitate to reach
out with any questions, any thoughts or reflections. Feel free to send them my way. And with that, take care and I'll see you
in the next course.