- I don't know about you guys
but every once in a while, I'll just have a day
where my brain is actually working well.
The gears of my mind are fully lubricated,
fully torqued.
When I'm in a conversation with somebody,
I don't have to search for the right words to say
they kinda just bubble up to the surface
and I can sling them out of my mouth onto them.
Or if I'm reading a book
I'm actually able to comprehend what I'm reading.
I'm actually absorbing the material
or maybe I'm at a party
and I'm just a little bit more confident.
I have a bit more swagger in my step
and I'm way more social than I usually am.
If you've had a similar experience
you probably also know that these moments are fewer
and further in between than we'd probably like.
It almost seems like once in a while, the universe decides
to zap us with this extra level of mental clarity.
It's like a glimpse of our potential,
it's a glimpse of how social or how confident
or how clear-headed we could be if we did the right things.
And it was actually this very feeling that got me
into self-improvement way back when I was a teenager,
way back when I was a teenager.
And I was kinda frustrated that I didn't feel
like this all the time.
I wanted to get to the bottom of it.
How can I more consistently feel
like there's not this brain fog?
How do I operate at my full potential more often?
Well, I'm happy to report that I haven't figured it out.
I'm not gonna pretend like I know the answer
to living at your full potential
every single day of the week
because I don't think that's actually possible.
It's a little bit of a fallacy of perfection
but I wanna go over three things
that have really helped me clear mental fog.
And it helps me operate closer
to my mental potential than if I didn't do those things.
But right before we jump into these tips
a word from our, no, I'm just kidding, not sponsor.
That comes later.
I just wanna say that if you haven't seen my video
on how to stop being tired all the time,
I think that is a necessary precursor to this video
because if you are doing things wrong
in your sleep, diet and exercise,
which are kind of your fundamentals to feeling well,
then I don't think doing these additional tips
will necessarily help you.
But if you do feel like you have a pretty good grasp
on your sleep, diet and exercise
and you're still feeling mentally sluggish and brain foggy,
and your life's a mess,
then maybe these tips will help you.
So strategy number one is to practice something
I like to call graduated stimulation.
From my experience, a great deal of my lack
of mental clarity is stimulation-induced.
When I do something that's overly stimulating
like browsing social media for hours and hours
or I get into a YouTube rabbit hole
just bingeing videos all day long,
I sort of start to develop a brain fog.
It might be a result
of kind of turning your rational brain off for a while
and just indulging in this primal existence
where you're just injecting yourself
with dopamine and stimulation like you're fiend.
And this is a problem because I feel
like a lot of us have a habit of doing our internet rounds.
First thing in the morning
we check Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube.
We kinda just see what's new in the world
is sort of giving ourselves hits of stimulation
before we've even done anything.
Before we've even fed ourselves,
before we've cleaned ourselves up.
This makes it extremely difficult to hop
into something more boring, more slow-paced
like doing whatever your job is, writing an essay.
So a way to solve this problem
is to practice graduated stimulation.
To organize your day
in a way that sort of ramps up the stimulation
as the day goes on.
So say whatever the most important thing you have to do
in the day is like one out of 10 entertaining.
It's not very fun.
You're kinda dreading it.
You should do that thing as soon as possible.
When you first wake up, when you have that mental energy
before your brain is absolutely corroded,
you should dive into that one out of 10,
not very fun thing first.
And then you can move on
to things that are gradually more entertaining
as the day goes on
and as your willpower seems to sort of drain
and your physical energy levels start to drain, et cetera.
So with this method,
you're not really cutting out these internet rounds
that everyone seems to do.
You don't have to stop really checking your social media
but you should postpone that
until after you've done the most important things
that you have to do on your to-do list.
That way it doesn't seem
like there's such a huge entertainment disparity
between your habitual pleasures
and the things that you actually have to do.
If you start from zero
than doing the not so fun thing is actually more fun
than doing nothing a lot of the time.
Whereas if you're bingeing social media,
which is like seven out of 10 fun for a 10 fun
and then you try to do the less stimulating boring thing
it seems like you're missing out.
It's like, "Oh, this is dreadful."
I've never used that word
in a video in my entire life.
Strategy number two is brain dumping.
One of the craziest things
about the human mind is that a bare minimum of 90%
of all of our brain activity is subconscious.
And I say a bare minimum because there's a little bit
of argument in the scientific realm about this.
Some scientists say that this number is as high as 99.9%.
Of all of our mental function happens
at the subconscious level,
which means that as we go about our day,
everything that we're in-taking, inputting,
everything that we're smelling,
we're seeing, we're hearing,
is being processed behind the scenes
even though we may not be consciously aware of it.
This is extremely important
when it comes to mental clarity
because we really need to monitor
what our subconscious knows
because even though we might not be paying attention to it,
we still know about it and it still affects us
and it leaks into every single thing that we do.
A great example of this is if you have a business meeting
or something you're supposed to remember
maybe an errand or taxes you're supposed to fill out,
the more things that you have piling up that you need to do
even if you're not paying attention to it,
the stress of these things
is going to affect every aspect of your being.
By putting things off, by postponing things,
by procrastinating things,
we're pretty much delegating it
to our subconscious to worry about.
And if we delegate too many things
to our subconscious to worry about,
it can often start to become way too much.
And it starts to...
we start to become anxious
and stressed and overloaded and brain foggy.
So I think a great way to deal with this problem
and make sure that you greatly reduce the risk
of this happening is by getting in the habit
of doing something that I like to call a brain dump.
Every single possible little thing,
everything you have to do,
everything you're responsible for,
everything that you need to remember,
you write down.
You have a giant document where you just let loose.
And it may seem counterproductive
to have a giant mountainous list of things
that you have to do.
You might feel like you will get overwhelmed with this.
In my experience, it's a lot less stressful
to have this giant list than to have that list in your head
leaking into every single thing that you do
throughout the day.
It's way better to have a physical copy
of your anxieties than it is to keep it in your head.
And try to be as thorough as possible.
Just doing that will help you ease the burden off
of your subconscious.
You're kinda just emptying your mind
onto a piece of paper.
You're just clearing it of all the filth
and just putting it somewhere that's outside of you.
Now as constructive and relieving
as that will inevitably be,
I'd highly recommend taking it a step further
and then organizing your tasks
according to the Eisenhower complex.
Now the Eisenhower complex is basically just a system
for organizing the importance
and urgency of your various tasks.
Things that are both important and urgent,
you should do first,
things that are urgent and not so important,
you should find a way to delegate
or do kind of a little bit later
or at the end of the day,
when you don't need as much mental energy.
Things that are not urgent,
AK not time sensitive, but are still important,
you should find a way to plan for those things
and figure out a time where you can slowly chip away at it
and things that are not urgent and not important,
you just shouldn't do.
Anything that's on your brain dump
that is neither urgent nor important,
you should find a way to just rid yourself
of the responsibility of doing that thing.
I cannot express to you how much mental clarity
this will give you.
Just not having your subconscious overloaded
with all of these tasks and responsibilities
that you have to do
and instead have them present
on some sort of external organized template
will free up your brain to work properly.
Now, the third thing I wanna touch on
is something that's kind of beaten like a dead horse
in the self-improvement community
but I have a few things to say about it.
And that is mindfulness.
Mindfulness is basically the act of training your brain
to exist not in the hypothetical, but in the real.
You kind of bring your consciousness from outside
of your head and all the busy, anxious, noisy thoughts
that's going on in there inevitably
and you bring it into your body,
into what's in front of you,
what's tangible, the sights, and the smells,
and the feelings all around you
and really stops you from overthinking everything.
And as we've kind of gone over this overthinking
or hyper-cerebralization,
it is kind of the main driver of brain fog.
And one really interesting thing about mindfulness
is that although it is best practice
to do it every single day,
you don't really have to.
Once you start learning the mechanics
of exiting your hyper-cerebralization
and entering the present moment,
you start to view the world through a different lens,
a more objective lens.
One that kind of accepts reality as it is.
And this can change your viewpoint permanently.
If you find that you're someone who overthinks everything,
you're prone to anxiety, you're prone to overthinking,
mindfulness is kind of a no-brainer.
So for like two weeks
just practice mindfulness for five minutes a day,
there's a million tutorials on YouTube as to how to do that.
But I think it's kind of a no-brainer.
So to recap, practice graduated stimulation,
figure out what the most important things
that you need to do in the day are
and do those things first.
Postpone your social media binge as long as possible
and gradually ramp up the entertainment value
of each activity that you have to do as the day goes on.
Secondly, practice brain dumping.
Take everything that's overloading your subconscious
and put it onto a physical media,
a giant word document of every single thing
that you have to do.
And then organize that brain dump
into the Eisenhower complex.
Thirdly, practice mindfulness.
Learn how to exit the noise off your head,
learn how to stop hyper-cerebralizing everything
and enter the present moment
where things are a lot more clear, simple, and calm.
If you do these three things,
I would be shocked if they didn't work for you
because these three things were some
of the most important things
in giving me mental clarity on a more consistent basis.
And I really hope they work for you as well.
As a bonus, I highly recommend checking out
the book "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius,
one of the great founding fathers of stoicism,
a philosophy that has helped me tremendously
in not just mental clarity, but in my whole life.
And I'm actually listening to that book
for like the third time
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learn something new, expand your brain,
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