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iAlign #88 - Why The Urge To Scroll Never Fully Disappears · The iAlign Podcast with Flint Mitchell

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're listening to the I Align podcast with Flint Mitchell, where I provide stories, resources, and tools for ambitious builders who are ready to gain control over procrastination, overthinking, and distraction.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: You are not gonna like the first point of this.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: So stick around for the second half because I promise it will come full circle and make sense.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: It is a really beautiful thought that I've been thinking for a long time, which is that every time you speak, your voice goes out and it impacts and shapes the world itself.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: And even if, from the physical perspective, the signals themselves get absorbed into the world, everything you speak, everything you say, everything you do becomes a part of the noise spectrum of the world itself.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I always really liked that analogy because it means that when I speak, when I say, when I do, it is actually impacting the world itself, even if it's just changing the baseline level of noise that exists.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: So take any signal.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: When it attenuates, it doesn't actually disappear.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: The wave is still there.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: It just gets smaller and smaller until it drops below a point, like a threshold where you can't detect it.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: But theoretically, it never hits zero.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's still there, it's just too quiet to hear.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now put your own patterns on that same curve.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: The voice that says, I'm not good enough, the pull to open a new tab the second that a problem gets hard, the slide back to where you were after two good weeks.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: If you've been running one of those for 20 or 30 years, some part of you keeps waiting for the day, you do enough work, and finally it's gone.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like the behavior is gone.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: You put the phone away and then you never pick it back up, right?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: To scroll your phone and get distracted.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's deleted, zero, gone.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the first point you want like, which is that day is not coming.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: But the reason that can be freeing is because it gives you permission to stop shaming yourself for a deeply ingrained behavior continuing to come up even when you work on it, or especially when you don't.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: In order to do this, you must be willing to accept that this is a worthy obstacle.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever the obstacle is, doom scrolling, procrastination, overthinking, etc.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: It must be a worthy obstacle to fight and overcome, right?
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: And just because these are large obstacles that have been ingrained for many, many years, it doesn't mean you can't create significant control in just a short amount of time, like 90 days.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: You can create enough control after this period of time, 90 days, 120 days.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: You have the awareness, the tools, the accountability, and the competency to handle the urges and triggers that will continue to come up.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: You solve for the 20% of triggers that leads to 80% of the problems or the behavior, right?
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then you create mastery over those 20.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then when the 80% come up, which are more rare, potentially still emotionally intense, you have enough proficiency to deal with them.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: And they may be more or less intense or emotional when they do.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like the rare things that show up that are going to trigger you to doom scroll or procrastinate or whatever, overthink.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Could be a loss of a loved one, could be really intense.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: When those things show up, you have greater competency in dealing with the urges associated with that behavior.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: But this is the reason why the curve never fully attenuates to zero.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: There's always some potential trigger or obstacle that will lead you to want to engage in these behaviors that you've been engaging in for many, many years.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: The overthinking, the procrastination, the doom scroll, all these things could continue to come up as a coping mechanism to triggers that you have yet to experience.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: So you can imagine that once you have effectively buried the behavior deep in the noise, because you've created control over the many common 20% urges that lead you to want to scroll your phone or procrastinate or overthink, there's still always the capacity for one of these deeply triggering events to bring it back up, right?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like I mentioned a loss, but it could be a breakup, a sickness, a layoff.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: This doesn't mean that you are guaranteed to fall into the behavior when these deeper triggers show up.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: It means that you will be more competent in handling them than you otherwise would have.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: But it does mean that they can still and may still and likely will still occur.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: The reality is that if you look at behavior change from this lens, you give yourself a higher probability of completely eradicating a behavior.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Let's take a silly example, something like a childhood behavior that has existed for a long time.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: When you were a child or a baby, there was a high likelihood that you would break down in emotions and cry and throw tantrums when things didn't go your way.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: And you learned through conditioning that this wasn't an appropriate way to behave.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: And what ended up happening was that early in your life, you started engaging with things you didn't like in a different way and you stopped throwing tantrums.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Your capacity to break down in tears over a difficult event still exists.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: You can still cry over frustration.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's still possible, but it's likely not something you ever think about doing anymore.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's a behavior that is very much eradicated, even if not completely gone, because theoretically, a really intense experience could actually evoke it.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: However, by and large, it's not something you think about and it's not something you do or engage in.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's basically completely gone, even if still there.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Does that make sense?
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: The point of this is to say that the same thing happens with behaviors you're actively trying to change right now, like doom scrolling or better focus behaviors, distractions, overthinking, all that kind of stuff.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: You gain control over these things.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that the triggers for them never fully go away.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: And because they have been conditioned or engaged in for so long, it's very likely that you will continue to feel triggers or just associated with them for a long time.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean you can't have control over.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Those aren't mutually exclusive things.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: There still will be events that could potentially or theoretically bring them out again.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: But if you treat behavior change through this lens, what ends up happening is you quickly get to a place where the behavior enters the maintenance realm, where by and large you never think about it because you don't engage in it, like the breaking down in tears when you're a kid.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: You just recognize that a theoretically triggering event could bring it back up.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: And because that is true, it warrants some attention, continuing to diffuse it or paying attention to it, or just bring it to your awareness or your subconscious so that it never again actually gets acted out, because you have methods in place to handle these more extreme or rare moments when they occur.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: And as we've already established, you created competency or control over the many common urges for these responses to occur or for these behaviors to occur.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: We will be resting tonight.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, horrible joke.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because the premise of this is actually that the work itself will start targeting the behavior itself.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: And what happens is because you are now committing to working on yourself and on this behavior for the rest of the life, that's what this commitment means.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: The work itself actually starts to change in the way that you target it.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just like two or three hours of self-reflection every day on doom scrolling, right?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Over the course of time, as you gain control and you quickly gain control over just a couple months of effort, the work itself changes because you become more competent in handling the main obstacles and you continue to dedicate yourself to the work because by doing so, you give yourself the capacity to become competent in handling any sort of behavioral blocker or urge or trigger associated with this thing, this behavior.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, you have to commit to the work, the work on yourself and on these behaviors for the rest of your life.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that, like I mentioned earlier, the work itself changes.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it goes from an hour of work a week or something like that to minutes.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the type of work you're actually engaging in is no longer deeply thoughtful or reflective or behavioral change work, but merely a bringing back to your mind or your presence or your awareness of these behaviors that you wanted to reduce or remember.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And that work itself can even just be being proud of yourself for the behavior change that you've created.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not that you're going to consistently be doing really hard, reflective work for the rest of your life on the specific behavior.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: The work will just change as you become competent.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then the work turns into methods of bringing awareness to it, being proud or working on the next thing.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's something I believe is like a pretty unfortunate consequence, is because a lot of people don't overcome certain behaviors like doom scrolling or procrastination, they're never able to work on the higher level obstacles of building something that's genuinely compelling to them and putting it out in front of the world.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because in order to get to that place and deal with those obstacles, you have to be able to put significant amounts of time in to focus and engage and build.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: But if you can't get past the procrastination and distractions or the overthinking, like you'll never be in that place where you get to really test yourself.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: So by doing the initial work on these things and becoming a master in them, then you start to have the privilege of working on the higher level things.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: And by doing that, you continue to bring awareness to these lower level things like the distraction and the overthinking or the procrastination, because you must.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: But it's different because you're working on the higher level thing.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: I hope that makes sense.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be honest about my own version of this because it's important.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that I haven't experienced growth.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: I have.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that the reasons why it happens now are different.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't scroll my phone anymore because I'm randomly led by a trigger to scroll.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like the reasons I find myself now more inclined to waste 10 or 15 minutes on Instagram are because I'm trying to do Instagram research, right, for my business, for conveying messaging, marketing and advertising, all that kind of stuff.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so sometimes, yeah, that leads me to scroll for an extra 10 or 15 minutes longer than I would.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: But the difference is a difference in competency where these distractions with scrolling for me are because I'm intentionally integrating them into my life.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas certain behaviors are completely eradicated and lost and forgotten because I don't have a need for that thing or that trigger or series of triggers to be near me.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: The scrolling one is unique for me because for a long time after I got rid of it, I just didn't do them scroll because I didn't have any reason to engage with social media.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then when I brought it back because of my work, I found that those triggers still existed, right?
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: They're always there under the surface.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I had to work on my competency of not scrolling by using it for work while being on the platforms.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: And even if I am integrating this into my life, right, this Instagram research, and I find myself scrolling for an extra 15 minutes because I'm doing the social media research, the reality is that now when that happens, I have backstops in place.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: I have tools and competencies that minimize the amount of time I personally lose.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I end up losing, I don't know, an hour or two a month, sometimes, usually less, as opposed to where I was years ago, or where the vast majority of people are today, where you may be, of losing many hours per day.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Literally two, three, four, five, six hours per day.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: So come back to that first point that you probably didn't like at the beginning, which is that non-productive or consumptive behaviors like procrastination, overthinking, doom scrolling, or even self-doubting behaviors, limiting beliefs, they attenuate, but they are never fully eradicated.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, you create mastery over them such that they become the noise, the baseline noise that you are capable of handling and that doesn't affect you.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: But because they still exist, you recognize that you must continue to work on yourself for the rest of your life in some capacity in order to have them stay there.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you don't continue to work on yourself, it's not to say like once you have mastery over these things are immediately going to come back in your life, but there's every possibility that if you stop doing any work on yourself and you just slowly slide back into old behaviors, eventually one of these things is gonna pop up and be like, oh hey, all of a sudden I found myself scrolling again.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: All of a sudden I found myself procrastinating.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: It might sound a bit unfulfilling, right, or unsatisfying as an answer, but the reality is that in order to effectively pursue behavior change, you must commit to it for the rest of your life.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: But by doing so, that is the most efficient way to completely and entirely eradicate it.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: This can sound a bit perplexing or counterintuitive, but I believe it is the most efficient approach, right, to long-term sustainable behavior change.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Peace.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoyed that episode.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you've been told your entire life that you're smart and you have potential, but you continue to see yourself not do what you said you would do again and again, and it's made you stop trusting in yourself or that you will ever achieve that potential, I want to help you.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Together, you and I will implement a core value-based system that will help you become decisive and focused.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to feel the relief from the weight on your shoulders because of the decreased noise in your head.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: Strength each morning because you trust yourself to turn lost avoidant hours of your life into forward progress.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Peace, when you no longer have to hide how you actually spend your time, and finally pride in yourself when you close your eyes every night before you go to sleep.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: If that's of interest to you, click the first link in the show notes, fill out the 30 second application, and grab a time on my calendar.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Spots are obviously limited because of my time and availability, but if they fill up and you're a good fit, I'll make sure you get on the wait list.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to speaking with you.