Latest / Dr. Derek H. Suite MD - The SuiteSpot / Pattern Interrupt: Break the Stress Cycle 5/7
Transcript
- 0:06Speaker 1: Welcome back, beautiful souls, welcome back.
- 0:08Speaker 1: It's finished strong Friday here on the sweet spot and I'm delighted that we are back together again to close out this series we've been doing on breaking stress cycles.
- 0:20Speaker 1: I'm Dr Derek Sweet.
- 0:22Speaker 1: I'm your host.
- 0:23Speaker 1: For those of you who don't know me, I'm a board certified psychiatrist.
- 0:27Speaker 1: I specialize in high performance and sports psychiatry.
- 0:31Speaker 1: But more than that, I just love working with individuals and people just like you who want to live their best life ever and be the best version of themselves.
- 0:43Speaker 1: You know, we've been really working hard this week.
- 0:47Speaker 1: We've been building on resilience, we've been adding to the resiliency toolkit and today we're tackling what prevents so many of us from finishing strong.
- 1:01Speaker 1: Ever wonder why Fridays often see our determinations sort of fizzle out.
- 1:07Speaker 1: We just kind of lose steam on Friday.
- 1:10Speaker 1: There's a neurological explanation for that.
- 1:12Speaker 1: You know I have a neurological explanation for everything right by now you've figured that out.
- 1:17Speaker 1: But no, honestly, there is a neurological explanation.
- 1:22Speaker 1: By the end of the week, our brain's striatum that's a part of the brain that is connected to the reward center, the brain's striatum it becomes depleted of dopamine, the pleasure neurotransmitter, right.
- 1:41Speaker 1: So we have less dopamine in the striatum.
- 1:44Speaker 1: Think of a car that's kind of running out of gas, and dopamine is the gas.
- 1:48Speaker 1: So this chemical depletion of the dopamine makes it so that the final push feels disproportionately like really hard, like really difficult.
- 1:58Speaker 1: No matter how motivated you were on monday, you just don't seem to have the same unmotivated you were on Monday.
- 2:08Speaker 1: You just don't seem to have the same Russian power on Friday.
- 2:11Speaker 1: And it's all neurological.
- 2:14Speaker 1: So I just gave you the answer to the test it's your dopamine depletion and your striatum.
- 2:16Speaker 1: You know, psychologically we also face what researchers call goal proximity fatigue.
- 2:24Speaker 1: So what does that mean?
- 2:25Speaker 1: That's a fancy term.
- 2:26Speaker 1: Basically it's a paradoxical tendency to ease up and to coast when we see the finish line.
- 2:37Speaker 1: Once the finish line comes into sight, it's a strange thing with us humans.
- 2:42Speaker 1: We just tend to want to coast and ease up, and studies bear this out.
- 2:48Speaker 1: Studies show that professional athletes sometimes unconsciously reduce their effort, believe it or not, when they're in the final stretch, especially if they believe they've done enough and they believe that they're going to win.
- 3:05Speaker 1: But as Serena Williams powerfully stated, the success of every woman, every athlete, should be the inspiration to another.
- 3:17Speaker 1: We should raise each other up, we should make sure that we're being very forthright and courageous and be strong and be extremely kind and humble and focused.
- 3:31Speaker 1: I love the quote because this just speaks to her relentless fourth quarter energy.
- 3:40Speaker 1: That exemplifies her mentality.
- 3:44Speaker 1: She just has a refuse to surrender mentality.
- 3:49Speaker 1: She does not give into fatigue.
- 3:50Speaker 1: In fact, she's looking at success around her and letting it inspire her.
- 3:57Speaker 1: And so here's your finish strong technique for today the five minute micro bowls.
- 4:05Speaker 1: Microburst is what I want to ask you to do.
- 4:07Speaker 1: When you feel like your Friday energy is draining or you feel tired, like you don't have it anymore.
- 4:15Speaker 1: I want you to set a timer for five minutes and I want you to engage in this exercise.
- 4:20Speaker 1: Literally, what I want you to do is say I'm going to give myself five moments or five minutes of intense focus, just for the next five minutes, and literally, when you do that just that brief exercise of just being super focused, your striatum will release more dopamine and guess what?
- 4:44Speaker 1: You will have the energy to finish.
- 4:47Speaker 1: I once worked with a surgeon who came to me and his complaint was that towards the end of the day he just he was focused, but he didn't feel the same level of focus that he felt at the beginning of the day.
- 5:02Speaker 1: And he used this technique.
- 5:05Speaker 1: He literally used the five minute technique that I just shared with you, the five minute microburst technique, just took five minutes and just decided, okay, I'm gonna just give this intense focus, and it made all the difference for him and he started practicing it and it was what he would do every day and he never had the problem again.
- 5:28Speaker 1: All right now.
- 5:29Speaker 1: That's it for today.
- 5:32Speaker 1: I want you to try your five minute microburst whenever you feel like you're losing focus, and reset your brain, reset your neural pathways and see what happens.
- 5:45Speaker 1: This is Dr Derek Sweet.
- 5:46Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining me this week on the stress breaking cycles and for joining me about just breaking through stress and anxiety and finding ways to use it powerfully.
- 5:58Speaker 1: I'm very, very impressed that you're here with me on Friday and I thank you for your time and for your listening.
- 6:05Speaker 1: You're amazing.
- 6:06Speaker 1: So that's it, my friends.
- 6:09Speaker 1: Tomorrow is Saturday, but not just any Saturday.
- 6:12Speaker 1: It's self-care Saturday and if you'd like to connect with me, don't hesitate to join me on Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn or YouTube.
- 6:22Speaker 1: I'm occasionally on threads.