Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) - For Productivity and Performance transcript

so I've set this channel up because I find things like self-improvement bodybuilding brain training all of this super interesting and there wasn't much content like this on youtube or on the web in general so I thought I'd share it with you guys and hopefully you'd find it interesting but what I really love is when some messages me and says that something I've said has really helped them which I didn't really massively expect to be honest because most of my videos about training like spider-man or becoming Batman I only enjoyed one comment someone left on my be like Batman video where they were like thanks a lot I'm Batman now um anyways I really love it when something I share helped somebody so in this video I'm going to share the technique or the knowledge that I think has been the most helpful to me personally as well as a lot of people that I know it's called CBT and it's in many ways the best kind of brain training that I know it's how to become limitless without the pill so I studied psychology at University and that's where I learned about all this stuff that's why I'm always talking about neuroscience and the kind of nervous system in relation to training it's that's my area of interest CBT was one of the concepts that most appealed to me and made a lot of intuitive sense this is a psychotherapeutic technique meaning that it's a form of therapy similar to psychoanalysis or behavioral therapy is used to treat a range of psychological disorders such as phobias anxiety disorders obsessive-compulsive disorder and it stands for cognitive behavioral therapy which will make sense in a moment when we get to it it's kind of a combination between cognitive psychology and behavioral therapy so normally CBT is used to address psychological issues however I believe it can be much more than that I could believe it can be used to become better than well it can be used to increase your productivity your focus your concentration how to get into a flow state to help you be more positive to help you sleep better it's great for overcoming insomnia to help you get more strength in the gym more mind muscle connection all of these things and I think it is actually really untapped in terms of its potential and talked a little bit about some of my ideas in that regard towards the end but we look at it in the context of treating mental illness because that's the easiest way to understand it so let's say that you have a phobia of heights you go and see a psychoanalyst this is an old school psychologist they'll tell you it might stem from something in your childhood a repressed feeling or emotion something you've forgotten maybe the way your parents raised you they'll talk to you go and really in depth they'll do inkblot tests analyze your dreams and try and dig deep to the roots of your unconscious problems that's falling a little bit out of favor although some people still use it and it still has its merits then you might go to a behavioral therapist if that didn't work and they would basically train you to not be afraid of those Heights by just going to Heights gradually getting higher and higher and making the experience less horrible by associating it with nice things maybe eating sweets maybe thinking happy thoughts and this would eventually prevent you from being afraid of heights but it's all about training it's all about interacting with the world while CBT says is that it's not just the experiences that cause the phobia but the way you're thinking about them and so it's going to try and change the way you think about Heights so let's say that you're afraid of heights what might be causing that fear well a behavioral therapist would say that you once experienced the height in an under negative circumstances you were very afraid and this caused a association between that height and the fear or maybe you watch somebody else fall from a height or maybe you were up high a lot in a negative context likewise the psychoanalyst would say that you had a bad experience in childhood that you repressed like I said but the cognitive behavioral therapist would point out that some people are afraid of heights and they've never even been high up so how does this happen and it's all up here because you can rehearse that situation in your mind you can think about being high up even when you're not high up and that can make you scare me create the Association you can wire those neurons together if you've watched my video on neuron neuroplasticity you can wire those new arms together even without having to experience it because when we imagine doing something to our brain it's no different from actually doing it similar brain areas fire as though you're engaging in the action so you can create a vivid enough experience in your mind's eye that you become afraid of heights and more than that you reaffirm that fear by going high up and then thinking bad things if you go up high say you're going to look at a view on a mountain if you're someone who's afraid of heights you might find yourself thinking damn what if I jump or what if I fall if I slip or you might find yourself imagining plummeting to the ground and all these things are making you much more scared than if you didn't think those things if you thought more positive things like what most people don't fall or I'm standing far away from the edge or who has ever tripped to that far you know we wouldn't be allowed up here if it was unsafe all that stuff if I died I'd know nothing about it it wouldn't even be that bad so you need to replace those negative thoughts and associations with positive ones by changing the way that you think and like I say this can affect many different areas of your life not just Heights so for instance if you're someone who struggles socially to speak confidently to people then you might think huh if I speak up now in this group it was gonna laugh at me they're gonna think what I said was stupid then they're gonna I'm not gonna take me seriously I'm it's just best not to do it and you start to get that physiological response as though you were already speaking in public you're shaking you're nervous you're sweating and you haven't down anything and these are all your friends they don't care and if they do TZ it's just because they love you so you need to replace those negative thoughts and this could make you much more confident you start to see yourself improving your experience in life twice in my life changing the way I think about things has helped me and I'll talk about that in a moment so now you know the problem what techniques does cognitive behavioral therapy recommend you use in order to address the problem it recommends you use something called cognitive restructuring which is as cool as it sounds you're basically reprogramming your own mind the first part of this is mindfulness it's being more aware of your own thoughts you can do this through mindful meditation which means you're meditating but not trying to block out thoughts you're just trying to reflect on thoughts and you can do it through journal keeping just writing a journal you can do it just through simply being more aware of what you're doing throughout the day and mindfulness in itself has a ton of great benefits because we do all sorts of things on autopilot we think and act in ways that we're not conscious of here's a little experiment to help you see how much you do without thinking about it try and count the number of times today or tomorrow that you sit down and stand up from a chair sounds really simple right I bet you you'll forget to do it after the second time you'll do it once you'll do it after this one you might even not do it that time and then you'll forget that's how unmindful we are also distracted by other things so be mindful notice your thoughts write them down if it helps and realize think about why is it that I'm afraid of heights that are afraid of speaking in public that I procrastinate that I can't sleep write these things down what's actually going through your mind often if you're very sad you might find that you can even get to the basis of it I really have the devil's in a proper funk I was really miserable because I was meant to be seeing my family I wasn't able to and I was just miserable all day and I was like why am i miserable who's this helping and I realized that deep down I was miserable because I felt like I deserved sympathy and if I acted miserable people would be nice to me except my wife was already being nice to me there's no one else in the house so it's a kind of natural reaction and when I realized that I was like what doesn't benefit me and I'm gonna see them later I can call them on the phone and I was able to be much happier so simply just being mindful of your own thoughts can help a great deal but then we're going to try and change those thoughts with cognitive restructuring one way we do this is with something called thought challenging thought challenging means you simply look at what it is that you're worried about or that's holding you back and then you challenge it you say how likely is this to be a problem so let's say that it's public speaking you're afraid of if you're going to go and give a speech and you've assessed what it is that you're worried about worried that people are gonna laugh at you if you say something wrong or if you stutter now we're going to use thought challenging to assess how realistic that concern is and here's the reality most people aren't gonna laugh in you if you stutter onstage most people are much more compassionate than that if you laugh at something because having a hard time on stage you're an ass we've all been there at the same time does it really matter no you don't know these people you're not going to see them again probably so stutter if you like and as soon as you relax and you stop worrying about stuttering then you don't stutter anyways so you have to help yourself to come to terms with that fear and realize it's not so bad likewise you can use this to overcome fears of achieving certain goals Tim Ferriss in the book the 4-hour workweek talks about fear setting which basically means that you you make your fears and concerns concrete the things are holding me back from taking chances in life so say you want to start your own business but you keep putting it off you write down the reasons that you're not the reasons you're afraid and then you assess each one on how realistic it is and you look at plans for how you'd better get those things if they did go wrong say for instance I would leave my job I'd have no money I'd end up on the streets and my wife would leave me well how about this you don't leave your job until you've got a working business model so you know it works and then you transition out maybe go part-time first so that's not really gonna be an issue you've probably got enough savings to last for about two months you're probably not completely unable to find more work if this goes sour you've probably got parents who've helped you out who you could live with your wife probably isn't gonna leave you for chasing your dreams if so then you know maybe you need to rethink your relationship again a lot of the fears that hold us back and not that realistic and by assessing them by making them concrete and realizing that we can overcome them and then the other one you can use the other form of cognitive restructuring is hypothesis testing and here what you're gonna do is not just think about the thing that's holding you back you're actually going to get out there and try doing it and see that you're wrong so for instance if you're worried about speaking in public because you think you're gonna stuff in people will laugh at you you're going to speak in public and you purposefully stutter you purposefully leave long gaps in between what you're saying and you just wait and people will wait with you because they're sympathetic and once you've done that a couple of times and you've realized it's not so bad then you can relax so by assessing your thoughts writing down what's holding you back and testing them you can overcome all sorts of negative ideas and at the same time think it's a good idea to include visualization in this in some regard because as I've said before when you visualize something your brain essentially thinks you're doing that thing you you light up the same brain areas and as we know neurons that fire together wire together so if you keep imagining falling off something and of course you create the association that Heights dangerous but if you vividly imagine you're standing far back from the edge of a cliff or a mountain then you can become more relaxed and start to remove that negative Association check out my video on embodied cognition to understand just how much visualization can play a role in the way we think it in fact explains how we understand our language even to me embodied cognition is the missing link between behaviorism and cognitive behavioral therapy because it explains how simply by thinking something we're able to create the new associations as they we were practicing them for real really all of this also demonstrates you just how much of your physiological reaction and your emotions are impacted by your thoughts and not just by what's actually happening by your visualisation an example I you like to use for this is that you're out camping with your friends and you hear rustling in the bush you're in the African savannah so you suspect this might be a lion a tiger a snake something dangerous what's gonna happen your heart rate is gonna increase you're gonna start sweating you're gonna go cold you're gonna feel nervous and you're gonna have that reaction as though something terrible is happening even before it's happened you're ready for anything but at the same time you're anxious you're nervous you're struggling to focus but if you were to then discover that it was just a kitten or that it was your friend having a laugh then you'd instantly relax because now you know you're not in danger so it wasn't the fact that there was a tiger there wasn't the reality that made you have that reaction it was your interpretation it was your internal experience and here's the thing we imagine lions all around us all the time we imagine that things are worse than they are all the time you think that your boss is gonna fire you because you're late no he's not it's illegal to do that you think that your partner's going to leave you cuz you forgot to text no she's not she's chill she's cool or he's cool pointers we over blow these things we make things worse in our heads and it minx that makes us less productive and makes us less focused and makes us less happy makes us less efficient in general so being more conscious of our thoughts and learning how to control them and change those negative ones can help a great deal [Music] CBT also involves learning a whole bunch of different tools and skills things like breathing techniques things like meditation that you can use to address the physiological signs and the thoughts when you notice them so for instance if you notice your heart rate getting higher CBT therapist a cognitive behavioral therapist will teach you to breathe to calm down to slow your heart rate we've talked about techniques you can use things like box breathing in order to achieve that they'll also use things like biofeedback which means looking at how your heart mate heart rate increases under certain circumstances and how it decreases under well others I'm pointing on my wrist because you might use a fitness track to do this for instance and then you learn more about how to control your own physiologic physiology and of course this is very interesting to any biohacker this is something that we already do it just makes sense to do it in this context so I said I'll talk about how CBT helped me personally and maybe this will help it to help you as well and to see how it could improve your own life so one example is when I was younger I had a kind of weird thing where I struggled with ping in men's urinals a little bit embarrassing apparently I'm sharing now the reason I was afraid it turned out when I applied a bit of mindfulness was that I thought that if I couldn't we I'd be standing there and then people would look at me like why is there a dude hanging out in the toilet not doing anything and they'd think I was weird perv so every time I went to go for a pee in a pub or something this would be my concern if people see me just stood there they'll think I'm a pervert and I won't be out of weed because I'm so nervous then I couldn't we because I was so nervous so I always ended up peeing in the cubicles which obviously meant queueing which obviously wasn't very convenient it was weird and I realized this wasn't healthy I needed to overcome it so what I ended up realizing was that a no one's gonna think that because most people won't be in there long enough and if they are they're in the same condition as me so and they're in no position to think that and be they're probably all drunk if I'm at the pub so they're not even gonna notice see I don't care if they think I'm weird perfect then that's fine as long as I don't call the police then I'm happy for a stranger to think that I'm checking out his tackle so I just reminded myself of this I would think it was those in the toilet it doesn't matter just cool and then I at the same time practice standing there for longer hypothesis testing to ensure that it really wasn't that bad nothing bad become a bit of course it didn't and today you have no problem being in public urinals a win for Adam another example of when it helped me was when I had troubles getting to sleep in the end my mum pointed out to me that the problem might be that I was trying too hard to get to sleep and that the solution was just to not try and sleep but just try and rest because even when you're lying down you're still resting and it might not be as good as sleep but it's still giving you some kind of recovery and that's good enough and as soon as I did that as soon as I took the pressure off of getting to sleep I was able to sleep because I was stressing about not in game not getting to sleep and that was raising my heart rate it was putting me in a physiologically aroused the mood I was looking at the alarm clock saying 4 a.m. and getting stressed out because at school the next day but then by thinking I'm just lying here I'm just chilling and that's fine and I actually enjoyed chilling and as soon as I started to just enjoy lying there letting thoughts wash over me and stop worrying about ways to get to sleep and I fell asleep like a light and I still come to this day so again that was a way that CBT could be used to treat insomnia and CBT is very effective at treating insomnia in general I do still have a phobia of stickers and I'm sure there's a CBT way of getting over that but I haven't tried that yet it's not so much a failure I just find them really gross I don't like looking at them I find repulsive you've learned a lot about me today yeah and see that he can also be used in all sorts of ways to improve your performance your efficiency or productivity so in a Productivity setting if you keep procrastinating you might use a bit of mindfulness to try and work out why you're procrastinating and to you know find ways to give yourself whatever it is you're looking for maybe you're tired this is just being more aware of your body maybe it's the what you're doing you find boring and you need to find ways to make it more interesting just as you can make things less important you can also make things more important by associating them with the goal that's at the end of the line so for instance if you work on a really boring project visualize and imagine the adulation you'll get from your client from your boss when you complete that project and visualize you know your successful future self who's got a great career because you've worked hard today and get yourself to feel that way people use CBT to overcome eating disorders and also to help themselves with diets being more aware of your thoughts can also help you to be more focused and more calm and collected when you're in a fight when you're practicing martial arts can help you to focus more on your workouts in the gym and I've talked about flow States and a lot of what we discussed there was about changing where you think and changing your physiological response to situations so that you're aroused but not anxious so that you're alert but not wired and see if you can also make you more social more confident more effective networker and entrepreneur so you'll make you again more like Eddie Mora on NZT because you're not because you're charismatic and charming and relaxed instead of anxious and nervous it can help you work towards your goals as in Big Easy as in the example of fear setting from Tim Ferriss I have a friend right now who's studying a coaching course helping people achieve their dreams and goals and that revolves around CBT - so that's CBT in a nutshell of course there's much more to it than that and I'll talk about it again in the future but this was just a quick overview some ideas and hopefully it can help you in some aspects of your own life and of course if you do find any of this useful and you have a serious problem that I recommend going to see a cognitive behavioral therapist and they'll help you through all this they'll teach you to use it properly if you did fancy video then please leave a like please share around that helps me out immensely subscribe to the channel for more like this hit the bell button for notifications and stay tuned because I've got tons more on the way I'll be talking about how to get your dream job online how to Train like an mi6 special agent how to accelerate learning and learn more topics all sorts of stuff bodybuilding calisthenics if that all sounds good then stay tuned thanks a ton for watching and I'll see you next time bye for now own guys I've got an idea for a future bio near video and it's gonna be on home bat caves so bat cave in this definition is either a home gym or home office that's really cool that makes you feel productive it helps you train maybe you've got some cool workout equipment in there some unique ideas maybe you've got a really inspiring home office design I'm gonna be sharing my home office and my gym that I call the bio lab partly because I'm being forced to move into a different room so you'll I'll be getting rid of this one it'd be nice to commit it to memory on film but I want to see yours as well so if you guys head over to the Facebook page and share a link to your or a photo to your home gym or your productivity space we got combined both and all the best ones with your permission I'll share in that video and we can look at all of our bat caves and come up with cool ideas for home productive workspaces and gyms and yeah nerd out like that so if that sounds cool then head over to the Facebook page the link will be in the description scroll down until you find that topic I'll post about that and that'll be there say again thanks Don for watching and bye for now