- When self-isolation first started,
I was like, you know what?
This is gonna be a piece of cake.
I work from home. I'm at home all the time.
This should be a cakewalk.
(solemn violin music)
It was a lot harder than I thought it would be.
Especially at the beginning.
My sleep schedule went to crap.
I stopped showering right when I got up,
because I didn't really have anywhere to be.
I also started playing a lot more video games.
- Looking for movement.
- Dude, my favorite thing in this game
is running people over with my car.
- That's my favorite thing in general.
So I think part of the reason why this quarantine
was so challenging was because, I think,
there's a huge difference between spending time at home
and not being able to leave home.
So for instance, with my own work habits,
yeah, I work from home, but I also have this habit
of leaving the house whenever I'm starting
to reach a lull in my productivity
or when I'm kind of goofing off a little bit,
I'll say, you know what?
I should hit a coffee shop and start writing.
But I don't have that option anymore.
I also usually like hitting the gym,
getting the blood pumping,
so that I can take your mind off things,
reenergizing you for the day, but there's no gym anymore.
They're all closed.
Another huge barrier that I've been encountering
is that I share this house with three other guys
who I'm quarantining with.
So since they're not gonna university or work anymore,
they're just here all day long.
And we're all really good friends.
So we distract each other a lot.
- He's filming. Jump on Apex.
- [Joey] Yeah, I'm filming, you guys can play Apex.
I can't play Apex right now.
- We've never played Apex just us three before.
- Thankfully though, over the past week and a bit
I've really started to ramp up the productivity.
I'm starting to feel more optimistic, like myself again,
I'm kind of getting used to this whole quarantine thing.
So I wanted to share with you guys
some of the things that have really helped me
climb out of this kind of quarantine-induced, chaotic,
what am I even saying?
I got out of a rut basically.
Okay, so the first thing I want to touch on
is that you need to be aware of the yo-yo effect.
So let me know if you've ever been in this situation.
You're in a little bit of a rut.
You're playing more video games.
You're not really taking care of yourself.
You're just generally kind of slothful.
You've lost your motivation to be productive.
And you kind of divulge into the self-destruction
and pleasure seeking mindset
for a long enough period of time,
until you reach a breaking point
where you're like, wow, I really feel like a piece of crap.
I'm gonna make massive change.
I'm gonna take massive action.
So you quickly do a little 360,
not 360, because if you did a 360, we go in the same way
but you do a 180 and you start going the other direction
and you start being super productive,
almost unnaturally productive.
You're starting to hit the gym.
You're moisturizing your face,
even though you never did that before.
You're clipping your nails. Shower...
Why is everything I talk about to do with grooming?
You're getting your work done on time.
You're just insanely productive
and you're starting to feel really good.
But you have a feeling in the back of your mind
that it's unsustainable.
And you eventually push yourself so hard.
You get burnt out, you lose all of your energy.
So you yo-yo back in the other direction.
And the cycle repeats itself.
So if you've ever succumbed to the yo-yo effect,
I'd imagine if you're a human being,
you have at some point in your life,
there's a couple reasons why this happens.
First of all, you didn't do the productive things
long enough for them to be locked in as a habit.
And the word habit's kind of lost its meaning.
But I mean something that is easier to do
than it is not to do.
Once something is a habit,
you don't really have to worry about yo-yoing back as much,
because it's kind of locked in psychologically.
The second reason why we yo-yo
is because the habits that we try to adopt
into our new lifestyle are so extreme,
we bite off more than we can chew basically.
So it's really important to pick one or two easy things
that are simple to do,
that you can actually count on yourself to achieve daily,
lock these things in a simple daily habits
until they're easier to do than not to do.
That way you won't get burnt out by doing them.
Okay, so what does this have to do with the quarantine?
Well, that's my next point.
The morning is the key.
One thing I've noticed, especially during this quarantine,
is that your morning shapes the entire rest of your day.
In a pre-pandemic society, people usually wake up,
they shower, they get dressed, pop something in their mouth,
maybe grab a coffee because they have somewhere to be.
They get out the door to go to work or school.
And that's their reason
for kind of taking their morning seriously
or getting into battle mode.
But during the quarantine,
it's sort of hard to flip that switch into battle mode,
because you're kind of just staying at home.
And even if you are working from home,
most people don't see the necessity
to treat working from home
the same as they would leaving to go to work.
But it is extremely important to do so.
Whenever you shower and get dressed,
you kind of flip a switch in your brain
that says, I'm in work mode now, or school mode now,
or at least I'm ready to start the day.
And if you wait to shower
and you wait till later in the day to get dressed,
or you never get dressed,
you're either a postponing flipping the switch
or not flipping the switch in general.
For me, flipping the switch comes down
to a very simple decision that I have to make
when I first wake up:
I can either choose the door on the left,
which leads to outside my room
and going through that door
always leads to me going down the stairs,
making coffee and using memes for half an hour
or the first hour of the day,
checking social media, et cetera.
Or I can choose the second door
which is the door on my right, which leads into my bathroom,
which always leads to me taking a shower,
putting clothes on, and then walking downstairs.
It's a very simple decision
but mentally I'm like two completely different people
when I shower versus when I don't shower,
when I'm in sweat pants
versus when I actually got ready for the day.
Sweatpants me likes to browse memes
and check social media and binge YouTube.
Showered me likes to light a candle
and write some content for YouTube.
So find out what your little decision is
that you have to make every single morning
and flip that switch as early as possible.
The third point I want to make is to leverage boredom.
So the quarantine is really boring.
Spending all day every single day inside
is kind of a bummer.
You start to run out of stuff to do pretty quickly.
But something I'd never talked about with you guys
on this channel is that this channel only exists
because of boredom.
And I only continued to make videos early on,
especially when I wasn't getting any views,
because of boredom.
I asked my mom like, "Hey, can I invite my friends over?"
And once we played Halo Co-op on legendary too much,
we got bored of that, we went made a movie.
There, I don't think I'd be making videos today,
if I wasn't bored back then with my friends.
I was still in university and between classes and studying
I didn't have an Xbox or a PC
capable of running very many games.
In fact, I used a Chromebook
for the majority of my university career,
and I was itching to find something to do with my time,
something to work on or work towards.
And that's why I started this channel.
When we fill every single parcel of time
with something to do with a screen to look at
or a show to watch, we almost lose touch with ourselves.
But this aloneness or this boredom is extremely important
because it helps you uncover things
that you need to address.
It can either lead you to think about and accept
something traumatizing that happened to you in the past,
or sometimes it's not that scary,
and you just have this underlying anxiety
because you haven't paid your taxes yet.
All these emails and letters are starting to pile up,
and this anxiety is the catalyst
for taking action on those things.
But if you keep distracting yourself,
you're never gonna have that,
you're never gonna be scared into taking action.
You know, that boredom created sort of like this itch to,
you know, go do something to to fill time.
Instead of just like having your time filled for you
via social media.
So, you're gonna have a lot of time during this quarantine
to sit alone with your thoughts and try to figure out
what the most important thing in your life is.
Don't distract yourself from this feeling.
So the last point I want to talk about
is probably the most important,
and that's this idea of using the quarantine
to your advantage.
It's very easy to take on a victim role.
In fact, it makes a lot of sense.
There's a compelling reason to play the victim
during a pandemic,
because you can't really do anything about it.
It feels out of your control.
It's scary. It's untreaded territory.
There's tons of reasons
why you can fall into feeling helpless
or confused or lose your way in some form or another.
It's a lot harder, but probably a lot more advantageous
to view it as an opportunity,
because the nature of being on house arrest for 24/7
actually has a huge advantage.
And that's because you have
a tremendous amount of predictability
with what your day looks like.
And that is the breeding ground
for developing healthy habits.
If every day feels like Groundhog day,
then that's the perfect opportunity,
this is fertile soil for developing habits.
A lot of people can't start healthy habits
during their regular life because you know, things pop up,
you know, maybe you have to go away for work.
Little Johnny has a baseball game you have to go watch.
So you have to skip the gym.
There's all these little things
that regular life throws at you.
Quarantine life is a lot more boring,
a lot more monotonous, but a lot more predictable.
So this is probably the best opportunity of your life
to lock in habits
that you can then take into your normal life,
once this whole thing blows over.
And if you're someone who has generally struggled
to implement good habits,
if you're somebody who's tried to meditate
for a day or two or three,
and then it kind of falls off,
or you try to develop a habit of reading
and then that kind of falls off,
then I'm actually gonna re recommend a book
that I've already recommended on this channel,
but I think it's the most important book
you can read at a time like this.
And that is "Atomic Habits" by James Clear.
I'm rereading it myself and I'm uncovering so many things
that I somehow missed before.
And it's making me realize it's one of those books
that you should read several times.
And I highly recommend checking out the audio book version,
specifically using today's video sponsor Audible.
And that is because it's actually narrated
by the author himself.
So his personal anecdotes that he wrote about in the book
really hit home and feel more personal.
Not only does audible have the largest selection
of audio books on the entire internet,
but every single month they send you one credit,
which you can spend on any audio book
in their entire library.
And they also send you two Audible originals.
And one of the best things about Audible
is that if you decide to cancel your subscription
at any point, you still keep your entire library of books,
including the books that you got for free
using their credit system.
So it's kind of a no brainer, especially at a time like this
when you have the opportunity to develop a reading habit.
So to sign up for your free 30 day trial
and listen to James Clear's "Atomic Habits,"
click the link in the description below
or text BETTERIDEAS to 500-500.
Once again, to sign up for your free 30 day trial,
click the link in the description
or text BETTERIDEAS to 500-500.
So I was editing this video and I figured
that I would take this opportunity
to tell you about-
(Windows startup jingle)
Mormonism. No.
So we're almost at 10,000 followers on Instagram.
The other day you guys helped me cook dinner
over a live stream and that was kind of hilarious
and it turned out pretty well actually.
And also the minute that we hit 10,000 followers,
I'm gonna be giving away a bunch of Kindles.
So the way you enter that
is just by following me on Instagram.
So make sure to click the link in the description below,
give it a follow, and it'll be a fun time.
If you like this video, make sure to hit like,
because when you hit like, the algorithm does fancy things
and my face ends up on people's homepages.
And maybe during the quarantine
this video can help people get their act together.
So it's kind of a win-win for everybody.
If you're lurking here, consider subscribing
and hitting the bell icon,
so that you don't miss future videos.
A lot of people are asking
about the Inaction is a Slow Death merch
and where they can get it.
I think the Teespring shelf still shows up on mobile,
but in any case, we're redesigning the shirts.
We're making some sweat shirts and all that kind of stuff.
I need to wait for it to come in the mail,
so I can take some product shots, et cetera, et cetera
But yeah, they look awesome.
But other than that, thanks a lot for watching
and we'll catch you in the next video.
Stay safe out there, wash your hands.
I think everyone's saying that. I'm not special.