Latest / Live 100 Podcast with Jason Yarusi / What Repetition Does To Your Brain

Transcript

What Repetition Does To Your Brain · Live 100 Podcast with Jason Yarusi

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: What if you would take every repeated action as a vote, right?
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Not only for the person you're becoming, but for the brain you're building.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: You're not permanently limited to the abilities you possess today.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: The story you're telling yourself is a temporary place holder for where you want to go if you're willing to go there.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, the brain is listening to those habits and building the person that you want to get away from.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Your idea here is you taking control and understanding your mind is open for the course that you want to set it on, but you have to be willing to start and jump in the car.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: All right, let's go.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: If you're tired, not feeling fit, tired just not in a focus, tired just not having the life that you deserve.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: This is the place to be.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Jason Yarussi.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, about a year ago, I took my family, right, and we were picking up Mexican food one night, right?
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: So for a family of five, it's a pretty long order.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I walk up to the counter and the lady asked for my name, right?
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I got my name Jason, right?
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: And in that part, I go to recite my order, right?
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: So now I have three little kids, they each have their little things they want, and then what PUA and myself want to order.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so the list is quite a list, right?
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: So you know, eight, nine items thick, right?
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: So in this part, lady takes down my order and she's not writing it down.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: She's just saying, okay, great, let me repeat this back to you, right?
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: And in part goes and dictates exactly back what I had said to her, right?
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then on a part, she goes, Oh, what was your name again?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just I have a really bad short-term memory, right?
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: So you think about that story.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: She just repeats this order, but in her mind, because she couldn't remember this, she's telling herself that she's lacking in some ways.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so many times in life, right, you tell yourself a story that you somehow have just navigated into the course of your mind that is true, when in fact it's so far from the truth.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: So we have to stop telling ourselves, right, how this story impacts our life.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: And we can think about how our past, right, now is a prediction of what our future should be, right?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: We think about how one event, one failure is a recipe for where we are in our life.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: And our brain, it's listening, it's listening to the repetitions of what we have put out there for our life.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: So think about it.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: What what if you would take every repeated action as a vote, right?
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Not only for the person you're becoming, but for the brain you're building.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you've ever traveled out of the country and traveled to London, right, think about just the vast size of what that city is, right?
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: How large it is, how many people are there.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: And just to even drive a taxi in the city of London, you cannot simply just turn on the GPS.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: You must carry the city inside your mind.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Before someone can even become a London famous black taxi driver, they must master this really demanding test known as the knowledge.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now think about this.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: If I was to say from where you are right now, your office potentially or where you are, to drive to your house, could you tell me every single street that you have to take and all the lights, all the impact for where it is?
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, in fact, if you want to be a driver at one of the black taxis in London, you have to learn the layout of over 26,000 streets along the way of thousands of landmarks and points of interest.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: You must mentally navigate from one destination to another without even relying on GPS.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: And during those examinations, they're given two locations, and you must describe each and every turn for the correct route street by street and turn by turn.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Simply put, out of 26,000 locations, you're given two, and you have to be dictating every part of that course correctly.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this process, I mean, it can take years.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the scientists at the University of College London studied licensed taxi drivers and discovered something remarkable.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, these drivers had more gray matter in a portion of the hippocampus associated with spatial navigation than their comparison groups.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: So you said, Well, what does that mean, right?
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: The longer they had worked as taxi drivers, the more pronounced some of these differences were.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the job, it didn't just give them more information.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: It just repeated the practice of associated with the physical differences in the brain.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: So what this entails is that you're not permanently limited to the abilities you possess today.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: The story you're telling yourself is a temporary place holder for where you want to go if you're willing to go there.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Your brain responds to what you repeatedly asked it to do, right?
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: So if you tell yourself I'm terrible at numbers, in fact, you might stay terrible at numbers.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you tell yourself I'm not disciplined, well, you might find yourself off the path more recently.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you tell yourself I never speak confidently, you might stutter more when you speak to people.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: If you say I'm not a runner, well, then every time you run, it might be that much harder.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: If you say I'm bad at leading people, well, it turns out that you might sit in the back of the room and not ever stand up to help people forward.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you say I can't remember something, well, in fact, you might have a harder time going into remembering certain things that easily you can if you wanted to.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that you have to necessarily define the permanent capacity of your brain.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: You just have to understand that it's possible.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Repetition is send your brain's instructions.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Every repeated action tells your brain disability matters, right?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Become more efficient at it.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Difficulty is a part of the adapt of adaptation.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: These taxi candidates change because the task demanded the effort.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And not because it was easy, but it's saying that if you want to be a taxi driver in the city of London, you have to remember these 26,000 streets point by point.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to wait to feel like a disciplined person.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: You perform disciplined actions and allow the evidence to reshape your identity.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, these specific practices, they create specific improvement.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: The taxi drivers didn't just simply say, you know, exercise their brains.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: They repeated practice routes, maps, visualization, and recall.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: All of those recounted to give them the ability to do the task.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: And your environment, it's always training you.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: If you repeatedly practiced distraction, avoidance and excuses, you become better at those patterns too.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: So positive or negative, if your focus in the actions in your brain and these repetitions goes in that direction, it's going to find you on a more navigated uh difficult course, right?
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's like you become a drinker and right, have a drinking habit, right?
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's the habits that you impart.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you become a runner and you choose to run, you'll be more habits for what you impart, right?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: So your ability to navigate this in your mind and understand that your brain has the capacity for which you put the effort into.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: So over these next 30 days, you can do a lot of things, right?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Practice it for 10 focused minutes each day.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: Work on doing something like meditation, giving yourself 10 minutes.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, keep this task, doesn't require massive concentration, right?
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, in meditation, one of the best ways to go and sit there is to sit there with yourself and listen to the noise of it, but notice when your distracted is bringing upon you.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: In terms of, you know, each session, think about how you can mentally stay focused for just that short time and how distractions came into your mind, into your life at certain points.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: And you can measure performance, you know, each and every day from one to 10.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Was I overly distracted today, right?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Or was I able to stay calm, say, focused in that 10 minutes.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: And stop saying, you know what, I'm just bad at this.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Start saying, well, I'm training this.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: And to understand that the goal in life is not instant mastery.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: The goal is giving your brain enough consistent evidence to begin adapting.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: You start practicing something each and every day.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's not if you will get better, it's you will get better.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: The only question is whether your repetitions are building the person you want to become, or honestly, the brain is listening to those habits and building the person that you want to get away from.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Your idea here is you taking control and understanding your mind is open for the course that you want to set it on, but you have to be willing to start and jump in the car.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I have for you today.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm JC Rossi.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do this.