Why Your Daily Life Stays Exactly the Same No Matter How Many Self-Improvement Videos You Watch
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Mental Health
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Your mind feels like a giant, but your body can't even get out of bed. This is a common swamp that office workers fall into after bloating their heads with self-improvement books and videos. Your knowledge is overflowing, but your reality is a constant loop of burnout and lethargy. This is not a matter of willpower. It is much closer to a state where your brain has declared a strike due to an overload of input.
Dr. BJ Fogg, founder of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University, explains the mechanism of how behavior happens with a simple formula.
In a lethargic state where motivation () hits rock bottom, you have to lower the difficulty of the behavior () to be extremely easy and provide an immediate prompt () to get your body moving. Instead of making a new resolution, you need to build a narrow path that leaves you no choice but to move.
If you watch short-form videos or read the news on your smartphone the moment you open your eyes in the morning, your brain's Reticular Activating System (RAS) gets soaked in all kinds of trash information right from the start. The energy you need to make important decisions is already depleted first thing in the morning. You need to clear complex thoughts and move your body first to get your day rolling.
When you wake up, execute the following three steps mechanically.
Try maintaining this routine for just 4 days. You will feel the cognitive fatigue and unnecessary worry you experience at the start of your day begin to decrease.
Resolutions like "I'll read a book after work" or "I'll work out" already shatter on the subway ride home. This is because your willpower was depleted long ago while handling company work since morning. If you don't fix your environment, your body will slide right back to the familiar bed and smartphone.
You must set up barricades on the paths to bad habits and clear the obstacles in front of good habits.
If you build a physical environment that you control with your own hands, your body will move on its own much better than you think.
At the bottom of lethargy lies the anxiety that you have lost control. Your energy drains when you pour your attention into things you cannot change, like a teammate's look, the economic situation, or the company's future. You must quickly reclaim your attention back to the controllable realm of your own body and fingertips.
When anxiety fills up to your throat and you don't even want to lift a finger, take out a sheet of white paper and fold it exactly in half.
Just the visual training of erasing things you cannot change from your sight calms your brain's stress response. Only when control is restored at your fingertips does the lethargy begin to lift.
When your mind is exhausted, your brain makes up lies like "I can't do anything right" or "This project is going to fail as well." This is cognitive distortion, mistaking emotions for facts. Do not fight the monsters inside your head; pull them out onto paper and isolate them.
When your mind is filled with fake scenarios, perform fact journaling.
Record facts whenever your emotions run wild, and check them every week. As you visually confirm the work you actually did and the concrete feedback you received, the fictional fears your brain made up at will lose their power.