(Breather) The seventh step to becoming a badass MOFO is to work on overcoming non-stop digital stimulation and distraction, which can only be achieved by focusing, prioritizing, and powering down with unwavering discipline. It means implementing proactive daily rituals (like working out) before even glancing at a screen.

This is especially important as looking at your phone/computer/email first thing in the morning activates the shallow, reactive, part of your brain. Talk about starting things off on the wrong foot! How can you expect yourself to be focused and productive when you’ve activated the reactive (and not proactive) part of your brain right after waking up? Answer: you can’t. So, why not at least try to resist the temptation? Instagram will still be there in a few hours, so do yourself a favor, and help yourself out by putting some time into creating (and incorporating) a few winning rituals (that will eventually become habitual) that you can do before you let yourself even look at a screen. Also check out previous shows, like Prevent Tech From Hijacking Your Mind, and the episode with productivity and marketing expert Seth Godin, for more tips on overcoming distraction and productivity. 

One of the most helpful pieces of advice Seth ever gave me about this subject was simple: “Turn that shit off and get the work done man!” Effective yes, but is this approach easy for everyone to implement? Maybe, but maybe not…what works for one person will not necessarily work as well for you, so in this show, I will outline some very valuable tips you can use to ensure you’re spending your time as efficiently and effectively as possible. Digital distraction is no joke, so here are some methods that will help you work around (and against!) the temptation to scroll down your screen all day long:

1. Facilitate Deep Work. Schedule time for work (first thing in the morning works best for most people) and check out my show covering the book Deep Work for details. Different methods work for different folks, but I found having an accountability partner was a really effective strategy for me. Carve out an hour or two in the morning to just get it done – and then email your accountability partner afterward to say, “I F%^&*ING DID IT TODAY!” You can even email yourself, it’s just the act of having some form of accountability that is most useful. 
2. Become Aware of the Cost of Distractibility. How much time do you think distractibility really costs you in a day? I bet we all underestimate how much time we lose when we take that “one-minute break” that turns into an hour. Take some inspiration from Jim Collins, who tracks all of his time on a spreadsheet, as this will provide you with an actual number of how much time it costs you in a day when you lose focus. Being able to quantify how much time you spend working and not working is a great motivator for getting things done and cutting out distractions. 
3. Be OK With Being Annoying. Do not allow yourself to feel guilty about not being immediately responsive to people or saying “no” to a lot of things. You may think it’s only going to take you 5 seconds to respond to that text message, but it’s really just opening a can of worms. Put your phone in the other room if you have to, just do whatever you can to make your phone (and whatever else distracts you) not easily accessible. 
4. Devote Time to Shut Down Time. Easier said than done, but, it still has got to be done. Do your best to remove any obstacles and temptations from the environment you’re working in. Similar to the ‘put your phone in another room’ method, I’ll sometimes go somewhere where I know there is no Wifi to ensure I won’t get distracted. 
5. Don’t Waste Time Waiting For Inspiration. Otherwise, you’ll be waiting a long time. So don’t focus on it, don’t sit around waiting for it to magically materialize. Instead, set yourself up with a morning routine you can actually stick to, and go! Don’t wait for inspiration, just get up in the morning and do not let yourself look at your phone/email/social media until you have gotten a substantial amount of work done. No excuses, no waiting for that serendipitous moment when the light bulb goes off – like Seth said, turn it off, and get the work done!

Lastly, really make an effort to save your screen time for the daytime….otherwise, the nighttime blue light exposure will most likely keep you awake all night, leaving you exhausted and trashed for the next day. If you want to be truly focused, you have to make sure your body is functioning well, which is why MOFO Mission #7 is to take control. 

TIMESTAMPS:

MOFO Mission no. 7 is Take Control. [01:23]

We must acknowledge the addictive properties of the dopamine hit we get with the ding of our phone. [02:26]

One tip from the Deep Work book is to make a solemn vow not to open your messages for the first 90 minutes in a day. [05:05]

It is good to have someone you are accountable to who will keep you on track. [05:42]

Tracking your creativity time ratio on a spreadsheet daily increases your awareness. [06:47]

Be okay annoying people [09:08]

Have distinct shutdown times. [11:00]

Inspiration is for amateurs. [12:41]

Start your MOFO assignment of Taking Control by committing to a deliberate proactive morning routine.  [14:58]

Only things that are natural and easy to maintain are healthy. [17:23]

When you get exposure to the cold for just 20 seconds, it results in a 200 to 300% spike in mood. [18:26]

Initiate a sequence of deep diaphragmatic breaths so you can control your cold-water therapeutic experience. [22:23]

Ben Greenfield contends that his morning cold water immersion had a greater impact on stabilizing blood glucose than anything else. [24:12]

You want to spend your evening hours away from screen stimulation. [26:01]

Plug your phone in outside your bedroom. Walk the kids to school. [28:15]

LINKS:

• Brad’s Shopping Page
• Brad’s Morning Routine
• Brad’s Cold Therapy
• Prevent Technology from Hijacking Your Mind
• Deep Work
• Brad with Cal Newport
• Andre Obradovic podcast
• Bird by Bird
• Dr. Rhonda Patrick
• Dr. Kelly Starrett

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Get Over Yourself Podcast

Brad (45s): And here we go with the show. Brad (1m 23s): It’s time for MOFO mission assignment number seven: take control, take control. Take control. Overcome nonstop, digital stimulation and distraction by focusing, prioritizing and powering down with unwavering discipline like a real MOFO. Implement proactive daily rituals, such as a morning exercise routine before you reach for the buddy screen and kick into shallow reactive brain function. Brad (1m 56s): Daily exposure to cold makes you more resilient to all other forms of life stress. So we’re going to put into place some winning rituals and behaviors that we will wire into habit, and also put up our defenses, our discipline against the nonstop assault of information technology into our brains, the hyper-connectivity and multitasking that it facilitates. Oh, okay, here we go. Brad (2m 26s): I’ve recorded numerous breather shows on the topic of tech dangerous tech addiction. So I’d love for you to go bounce over and listen to some of those to go into detail. One of the breathers shows was titled Prevent Technology from Hijacking Your Mind. And this is where the essence of the show was that we must acknowledge the addictive properties and our draw to novel stimulation in our environment to get that dopamine hit in the brain that reward that instant gratification, that pleasure that occurs when we react to the ding of a text message or whatever other novel stimulation hits us that breaks our concentration from doing that deep work. Brad (3m 6s): And that’s the title of Cal Newport’s wonderful book, Deep Work. I did a whole breather show covering insights from his book. I’d love for you to listen to that one. Cal Newport has some great suggestions to actualize the highest expression of your talents by teaching your body and developing discipline and rituals to focus and bring out the best in you rather than just reacting all day to dings and inbox messages. I remember my show with Seth Godin, the productivity marketing expert, and I asked him, I thought was a thoughtful question. Brad (3m 40s): Hey Seth, you know, when I’m trying to write a book or focus on peak performance tasks and the constant pull of email is so distracting, what are some of your suggestions and tips to help overcome that pension for distraction? And he said, turn that s**t off and get the work done, man, that was it. No need to elaborate, no need to candy coat it. So I guess this show could be a few minutes long. He told me to just turn that s**t off and get the work done, but let’s get into some memorable tips and takeaways that we can pull from other shows. Brad (4m 10s): And then of course implementing the winning rituals will help you sort of default into success because you have these things going for you. You could call them built in default protection mechanisms against getting sucked into hyper-connectivity overstimulation distraction. For example, my morning flexibility mobility routine, which you can see on YouTube and I’m making a day in the life video. Brad (4m 41s): So you can see all my tips and tricks of stuff I do, but especially the morning routine has been so valuable to me. And it keeps me away from whatever the alternatives might be. If I didn’t have this thing, rock solid into habit and so important to me and so familiar that if I delay it or miss it, it feels really weird until I get the job done. Yeah. So in Deep Work, the book by Cal Newport, he had a bunch of sections with summary tips. Brad (5m 12s): So we’ll just cover those quickly and you can listen to the whole show. And one of his tips for facilitating deep work was to schedule time in, put it on your calendar for fo real, maybe first thing in the morning, because that’s the best time for the brain. It’s fresh. The decks are clear. And if you make a solemn vow to not open up your text messages or your emails for the first 90 minutes of the day, that is a really winning strategy right there. Brad (5m 42s): My main man, Andre Obradovic, life coach in Australia, we did a great show together on the podcast a while back and in our personal lives, he’s been a big help to me. And one of the things he did when I was complaining, just like I complained to Seth Godin about all the distractions. I said, man, I’m on a book deadline right now. And all this stuff seems to get in the way, all these real life matters. What kind of tips do you have for me? And he says, here’s what I want you to do. Can you take two hours of your morning and commit to the most important thing you have to do in your life, in your Workday? Brad (6m 13s): And I said, yeah, I think I can handle two hours. Oftentimes we think of how do we make our eight hour day more productive and then an hour slips away and we feel bad about it, but come on, let’s do some bite-sized goals here. So he said, why don’t you do this? Get your two hours in and then email me before 12 noon your time. And the subject line says, I effing did it today, mate. And that’s it. No, no body of the email, just the subject line. So once I do it, I can check in with him. And the expectation was that he would get an email every single day for the next 30 days. Brad (6m 47s): I freaking did it again, mate. You know what I mean? Someone to be accountable to and you can be accountable to yourself. Well, you can send an email to yourself that says I effing did it today, mate, and go from there. So that scheduled time is really useful, really effective, really important. Jim Collins, the bestselling author of the great business and productivity books like Good to Great. He was on a podcast and described how his goal and his objective every year is to spend 50% of his Workday in creative, strategic high level thinking mode. Brad (7m 24s): I forget the exact term he used for it. We can call it deep work in honor of Cal Newport’s book. But Jim Collins is going for that 50% score, which seems reasonable. But if you think about it or if you tracked your own time, maybe that would be a difficult objective to reach. When all these little things get in the way. Professionals who bill by the hour, accountants, lawyers, architects, they have a much better performance record here because they definitely have to account for their time. And they’re hitting stopwatches. They’re using the software to know which client to bill and know when to push the stop button if someone comes into their office and interrupts them. Brad (8m 1s): And I know a junior lawyers in the big firms, they are expected to bill 2000 hours a year to justify their healthy salary. And if a lot of that’s frittered away from YouTube time, Oh boy, you can’t very well be billing the client for that. So Jim Collins talks about how he has an obsessive tracking of this creativity time ratio on a spreadsheet every single day. So increasing your awareness of your pension for distractability and how much time it takes. Brad (8m 33s): I would bet that we all underestimate how much time our distractability takes when a neighbor stops by or when I’m heading out to throw out the garbage I’m in the middle of an important work assignment. I get talking with the neighbor, we go into their house to look at their new granite countertops. Then I come back and forget that I haven’t watered the front patio yet and so on and so forth. And all of a sudden an hour goes when you thought it was going to be a one minute break to go throw away the garbage. Okay. So schedule time in on your calendar, keep track of your creativity time or your productivity time. Brad (9m 8s): So you can increase your awareness of what you’re, when you’re not spending good time. Third is be okay annoying people by not being super responsive. Whoa, that’s a funny one. Huh? And interestingly, social media itself and email is predicated on a reciprocation, right? That’s the whole idea here is that they have a reply button built into our email window. And social media is all about the confirmation, getting the likes, the views, counting up the number of people you engage with. Brad (9m 42s): And we don’t have to necessarily make a blanket condemnation of social media and the like buttons or the email inbox being such a distraction. Of course, these are wonderful tools when used appropriately, but that idea of being okay, not being super responsive, not being all things to all people immediately. That’s a really nice concept in Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work, he talks about a, I believe a fellow professor who knowing that your main objective as a professor and your rise through the rankings of academia and gaining tenureship and all that great stuff is largely predicated on the great work that you publish. Brad (10m 24s): The studies that you get published in prestigious journals, along with your teaching assignments and whatever else. And so he has this one professor that prides himself on being a total flake and saying no as much as possible to all invitations for being on boards or advisory committees or being, you know, engaging live with people. If there’s going to be a meeting or something. And he puts out more papers than all of his peers and has a fast rising career accordingly because he’s focused on the highest expression of his talents. Brad (10m 57s): The so called deep work be okay, annoying people is number three, Number four, have distinct shut down times and boundaries for your engagement with technology. And this is obviously at the end of the workday, when you can ceremonially flip that laptop, lid shut or hit the shut down button on your desktop device or whatever, it really means a turn on a dime and walk out of your home office or walk out of your workplace and be done with it. Brad (11m 26s): So that’s really important to have a distinct shut down time at the end of the day, rather than having that mobile device extend your workday into what should be the leisure hours. But I’m also gonna argue that you should have these boundaries in place throughout the workday so that your availability on the telephone or on the email is, has distinct hours instead of just being constantly available, constantly answering, constantly responding. So I’m working on that myself, man set aside those times where you can be deeply immersed in deep work. Brad (11m 60s): You know, what’s so effective for me, especially when I’m writing books, which is the deepest I can think of is I purposely find myself in areas where there’s no internet connection, like a parking lot or somewhere outside of a comfortable home environment where I have all the technology at my fingertips and they, the browser window open in case I want to look up something, but there’s something to be said for the inconvenience of, let’s say sitting in a car that’s growing hotter by the minute, if I’m out in a parking lot during the, the sunny times a day in year, but having a little bit of discomfort where I’m really focused on getting the work done and working really efficiently has, has really been a nice thing. Brad (12m 41s): Okay. Finally, number five is: inspiration is for amateurs. Just focus in and do the work. So a lot of times we’re trying to create these ideal circumstances. You can think of the dreamy image of the writer who goes off to the mountain cabin and chops up some wood, lights a nice fire, brew, some tea and sits down at the typewriter, never a computer, right? It’s always a cool typewriter for those real writers. And that’s when they can write their masterpiece novel or what have you. Brad (13m 14s): But I think we kind of get in our own way sometimes thinking that everything has to be perfect. And that’s why I referenced my example of sitting in a hot parking lot. And let’s say waiting for Mia Moore to come out of her office or something. And I don’t mind waiting for really, even a long time because I’m getting work done and it’s not the most convenient place where I can step away and go make myself a delicious, wonderful meal or distract myself in other ways with home chores. And I think all of us who have been obligated to work at home now have to be much better drawing those boundaries between the necessary chores that are in our eyesight and getting that deep work done. Brad (13m 52s): So I guess that inspiration is for amateurs part also, or mostly applies to your mood and your creative inspiration. And however you’re feeling on a certain day, maybe sometimes you don’t really feel like it, but you still sit yourself down in front of the screen and get some work done. And I particularly appreciate the advice given to writers and aspiring writers whereby this is not any particular person, but a lot of people say that, you know, the, the greatest cure for writer’s block is to start typing out something and get going, whether it’s crappy or not. Brad (14m 28s): Oh, okay. Anne Lamont comes to mind, great writer with many bestsellers. One of her books titled Bird by Bird is particularly directed toward aspiring writers. And one of the chapters is titled s****y first drafts where she’s talking about just getting something on paper, reading it it’s terrible, but it leads you in the next step, down the journey, rather than sitting there staring at a blank screen or fussing with that fire in your mountain cabin because it’s not burning perfectly before you can get down to the business of writing. Brad (14m 58s): Oh, okay. So the assignments on number seven, taking control, let’s start with putting into place some winning lifestyle behaviors that will make you less susceptible to hyper-connectivity and distraction. And one of them is to commit to a deliberate proactive morning routine. My favorite recommendation is the flexibility mobility, a sequence of exercises that I display on YouTube, and that is paired with a chest freezer, cold plunge. Brad (15m 31s): So that cold exposure with so many hormonal and cognitive and intangible benefits of making you more focused and disciplined to all other forms of stress and distraction throughout the day. Because if I can make myself jump into a chest freezer filled with 38 degree water and, you know, stick to that plan, no matter what not, if I, whether I feel like it or not, but just doing it without thinking about it and wiring that into habit by definition or hope, I would be more resilient against, let’s say things like the distraction of the email inbox or the pull of watching a YouTube video rather than finishing the last few slides of your presentation or what have you. Brad (16m 13s): So you can do whatever works for you. But if it’s something that’s a template routine that you do, same exact thing every single day, that’s a really important element of it because you don’t want to have to exercise your creative energies in this area nor apply willpower or decision making skills. You just get up and do it in a robotic manner. And that will sort of make a statement that you are all about being proactive rather than just being a victim of a technology hyper-connectivity distractability. Brad (16m 51s): So if it’s five minutes that you can start with, the major important thing is that you commit to doing it every single day, no matter what. So please don’t set your sights too high and say, I’m going to get up and go to the gym at 5:30, every single morning and three days a week, I’m going to do the bootcamp class and the other two days, I’m going to go work on the mat by myself and do some yoga. That might be a little too daunting. I recommend getting more sleep. So for all of you that are seen in the gym at 5:30 in the morning, hopefully all y’all in there went to bed at 8:30 or nine. Brad (17m 23s): Otherwise, Holy crap, let’s check back in five years, let’s do things that are sustainable, fun, and feel natural and easy to maintain. That’s what Johnny G says. My main man, the creator of Spinning a fitness celebrity and legendary ultra endurance athlete. Only things that are natural and easy to maintain our healthy. So we want to get healthy habits. One of them, how about a five minute morning stretching awakening routine? You can do the yoga sun salute a sequence of exercises. Brad (17m 55s): That’s easy to find on YouTube, but something where you get out of bed and do something advocating for yourself and your health and your wellbeing and your balanced lifestyle. So that is a great start to show that you’re in control rather than ad week survey suggests that 84% of Americans reach for their mobile device as their first, very first act of the morning. So maybe we can step out of being one of those 84 percentile and say that you do something different. Brad (18m 26s): Okay. And I’ll tell you what happens the magic of what happens when you wire something like this into habit. My own mobility, flexibility, core strengthening routine that I started in 2017 cause I wanted to kind of improve my fitness space that I launched all my formal workouts from, reduce my risk of injury by becoming a little more flexible. So you can see me if you type in Brad Kearns morning routine on YouTube, you can see me doing these hamstring kick outs and frog legs. Brad (18m 57s): Well, my legs are raised off the ground doing a core strengthening, doing a few yoga moves in there, like the yoga wheel, the extremely difficult stretch that you can have your hands and feet on the ground forming an arch like the St. Louis gateway arch. So that’s my morning routine that I started. I haven’t missed a single day in almost four years now. But interestingly enough, when I started it, I thought it was a five minute routine. And then when we filmed it for the, for the YouTube production, it turns out it takes about 12 minutes. Brad (19m 28s): So I had this super enjoyable, satisfying, and beneficial morning routine. That seemed like five minutes, but was 12 minutes. And what I’ve done over time is I’ve added some exercises to the template to increase the degree of difficulty and the benefits, the more stuff I do. And so today, amazingly the morning routine, the sequences that I do every single day, the same thing takes a minimum of 35 minutes. And it’s quite difficult. I’ll show you on my a day in the life, Brad Kearns video, and took some time to work up to it, to be able to accomplish this stuff every single day, whether I feel like it or not. Brad (20m 5s): But it’s such a great centerpiece of my fitness experience. Even if I don’t do much the rest of the day, it’s still a pretty darn good 35 minute workout every single morning. And what I often do is roll into a proper workout right after that. So maybe I’ll step into the fitness center that is my living room and go on and do another 15, 20, 25 minutes of strength training. And then man, I knocked that knocked that objective off for the entire day, but I know that I can count on myself no matter what. And boy, that’s a huge difference from frittering away every single morning with reaching for the phone and seeing what’s new in the world of COVID news or politics or sports or things that you can catch up on later, or even miss out on and not really miss out on much overall in life. Brad (20m 53s): And so pairing that with the cold plunge and finishing off with that cold plunge, Oh, the hormone hormonal benefits are amazing. I detailed that in an entire full length show about cold therapy. I’m working on a book on the subject too. So more fun stuff coming there, but briefly the prominent finished study that’s referenced often revealed that a as little as a 20 second immersion into 40 degree Fahrenheit water. So yes, pretty cold and hard to find that outside of dumping ice into your bathtub or getting a chest freezer or going to a outdoor body of water at the right time of year in your environment. Brad (21m 31s): Just a 20 second immersion into 40 degree water results in a 200 to 300% spike in the mood, elevating hormone nor epinephrin and the spike lasts for up to one hour. And I think we can all reference that invigorating, refreshing feeling we get when we jump into the icy river, when we’re camping and we shriek and jump out right away and warm up in a nice towel, but you feel alive and invigorated for a long time afterward. So if you want to take this as one of your suggestions to take control of your life, remember that’s the title of this assignment? Brad (22m 3s): How about starting with a cold shower? Pretty simple. So if you just get in your usual morning shower, whatever temperature, warm temperature you like, but then over the final 30 seconds or a minute or two minutes, if you’re feeling motivated, make a commitment to grab that handle and turn it to full blast cold. And as you do so, or right before, I’d like you to initiate a sequence of deep diaphragmatic breaths and maintain a total commitment to maintain control of your breath throughout your cold water experience. Brad (22m 38s): And when you can maintain control of your breath, you will override that initial shock panic response. I think it’s called the mammalian dive reflex, where you immediately shift into a, a fight or flight extreme reaction, usually accompanied with hyperventilating and that panic breathing that will usually cause you to turn the handle back over to warm or jump out of your friend’s chest freezer, or jump out of the river and get right back into a towel. Brad (23m 8s): So we’re far more resilient than we can imagine when it comes to cold exposure. And we’ve completely disregarded this in modern life. As we warm up with indoor circulated air and our warm clothing, if we are going outside, cranking up the heater in the car, as we drive along, and it’s really, really healthy to reintroduce these hormetic stressors that have been part of human life since the beginning of time and have made us the strong and resilient creatures that we are today. So a little bit of cold exposure, it’s called therapeutic cold exposure. Brad (23m 41s): It’s not called torturous cold exposure, right? So I’m not talking about getting into some chest freezer and shivering and feeling miserable. And I make a huge point of that in the video, you can look on YouTube, Brad Kearns, chest freezer, cold therapy, cold plunge. And I’m talking about how I always get out when I, before I experienced that sensation of shivering or true discomfort. And in fact, when I’m able to maintain control of my breathing really cold inside the tub and nor when I get out, I feel refreshed and energized. Brad (24m 12s): So it’s a big difference from maybe what it seems if you’re watching the video and you haven’t really tried it yourself. So try it in the shower and see how powerful breath control is, and you can really get it going. And the science is so strong that these brief bouts of cold exposure have a profound influence on your overall health. Okay. I heard Ben Greenfield on a recent Ben Greenfield fitness podcast. Talk about his experience with the continuous glucose monitor. And he contends that his four minute morning cold water immersion had a greater impact or a greater benefit to stabilizing blood glucose throughout the day than anything else he can think of. Brad (24m 54s): Incredible. There’s plenty of research to validate the benefits of cold exposure, right? You can go to Dr. Rhonda Patrick’s found my fitness.com website and download it a free 26 page PDF with a lot of scientific detail about the studies they’ve done. My book’s going to be really user friendly and easy read to talk about these scientific benefits in user-friendly forums that you can really kind of grasp what’s going on when you jump in the water. But you get this wonderful anti-inflammatory benefit. It provides an immediate and sustained boost in immune function. Brad (25m 25s): It turbocharges fat burning for fat reduction, and this can be great way to help you break through weight loss plateaus, but we’ll do a whole nother show to detail that because it’s not as easy as it might sound. You might’ve seen these articles where it says cold exposure stimulation is the activation of brown fat, and then that activates more burning of body fat. But it’s also believed that cold exposure can spike appetite. So what you have to do is kind of a strategy here where you’re going to override any appetite spikes, do that therapeutic cold exposure in the name of dropping excess body fat. Brad (26m 1s): And it takes some focus and discipline and resilience, but it is I think, a secret weapon, especially when you’re trying everything like dietary adherence and a good exercise program. So that’s the plug for the morning routine. And talking about the evening there’s a lot of validation to the idea that you want to spend your final evening hours away from screen stimulation. If you are introducing excess artificial light and digital stimulation after dark, you are interfering with the very delicate hormonal circadian influenced assesses that help you get to bed, fall asleep, gracefully, and cycle through all the stages of sleep, such that you awaken, refreshed and energized near sunrise every single morning. Brad (26m 51s): Yeah, I know that’s a pretty big dream, but if that’s not, you, you’re not that morning person, that early bird let’s look at the level of artificial light and digital stimulation after dark. And boy, if we can just kind of tone down and mellow out our home environment, using the orange light bulbs, using the blue blocking eyewear, the orange or yellow colored lenses using candle light, using the Himalayan salt lamps, you know, just mellowing out the experience in your home in the final two hours before bedtime and doing calm, quiet mellow activities like live interpersonal socializing, talking, playing cards, reading, drawing, doing an art project, doing something besides the hyperstimulation of engaging with the screen. Brad (27m 39s): And if you’re going to do some passive entertainment, like watching a show, that’s arguably less stressful and less disruptive than actually doing work and cranking through your email inbox that you fell behind on during the day. So we want to have a nice mellow evening experience. That’s all about taking control of the other things that can come into play and mess with your sleep and boy, what a wonderful assignment to tackle and not that big a deal it’s just about using that power down button. We got a great tip from Dr. Brad (28m 12s): Kelly Starrett in our podcast when I thought we were going to talk about his area of expertise, like full mobility, flexibility, injury prevention. He’s the King of the CrossFit scene and the ready state.com is this wonderful website, all about optimizing human movement, but he was really fixated on taking control of our environment and making a winning, winning environment that sets you up for success. Some of his great tips, like plug your phone in, outside your bedroom. So you’re not tempted. Just make that your habit. And then it’s much easier to say, yeah, I avoided screen last night and this morning because the thing wasn’t in my face. Brad (28m 44s): So, you know, don’t make it so hard on yourself and tempt yourself on those dopamine hits. He also mentioned for those with families walking your kid to school and putting in that, that daily walking objective as a family and Oh, what’s that? Oh, you live too far away. It’s a couple of freeway exits over to your kid’s elementary school. Alright, we’ll park your car a mile away from the bloody school. Walk your kid in and walk back to the car. Guess what? You’ll miss out on the conga line of carpool drop-offs anyway, a win win all around. Brad (29m 18s): That concludes the MOFO mission. Number seven, take control. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to the show. We would love your feed back at getoveryourselfpodcast@gmail.com. I would also love if you could leave a rating and a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts, I know it’s a hassle. You have to go to desktop iTunes, click on the tab that says ratings and reviews, and then click to rate the show anywhere from five to five stars. Brad (29m 50s): And it really helps spread the word so more people can find the show and get over themselves because they need to thanks for doing it.

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