today, my friends and I are trying the treadmill test. Oh my God, a Harvard study found that the longer you're willing to run on a speeding treadmill could predict your future income, success of your marriage, and overall satisfaction in life. And it's the final test to see if I can actually rewire my brain to love doing hard things. And the time starts now. I don't think of myself as a resilient person. I procrastinate on hard things, get discouraged easily, and am quick to give up. And while I've started making improvements in this area when I'm motivated and focused, I can still feel the pull of old habits in day-to-day life. So for the next 30 days, I want to use the best research in Psychology and Neuroscience to see if I can rewire my brain to become more consistently resilient, more focused, and someone who thrives when things are at their hardest. Basically, I want to change how I approach every single challenge for the rest of my life. So that should be easy, right?

because I'm looking for daily improvement, I'm gonna monitor three daily habits that I've been working on developing: improving my strength, cardiovascular health, maximizing my focus at work, and reducing my phone time. Week over week, my goal is to see if I can improve every week in each of these categories from wherever I was the week before. And with this continuous effort, I really hope that I can rewire my brain to love doing hard things. Wait, is it even possible to rewire your brain? We've studied using functional magnetic resonance imaging, this is a kind of brain scanning technique where you see the actual differences in activity in different parts of the brain. You go into a state of hypnosis and you turn down activity in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate, so you're less likely to be distracted by anxiety, by concerns. The back part of the brain, we call the default mode network, it's a part of the brain where you see self-evaluation, you disconnect from that. So in other words, what you're doing in

hypnosis is you're disconnecting from the usual expectations that often slow us down and make us think we can't do something when in fact we can. This is Dr. David Spiegel, the associate chair of Psychiatry at Stanford and a leading expert in how we can use self-hypnosis to change our behaviors, thought patterns, and make lasting improvements to our lives. He's agreed to run me through a hypnotizability test to see if self-hypnosis might be a helpful tool for me during this goal. So be as comfortable as you can and then again on one do one thing look up all the way up high as you can. Two do two things slowly close your eyes and take a deep breath. And three do three things let the breath out let your eyes relax but keep them closed and then let one hand or the other float up in the air like a balloon. And again that's your signal to yourself and to me that you're ready to concentrate imagine you're floating in a

bath like a hot tub, or just floating in space, and notice how quickly and easily you can use this comfortable state of self-hypnosis to change the way you and your body feel. [Music] What are you feeling like? A loosening, almost like a relaxing. Good. Now imagine just floating over your computer screen and picture what you're going to do next as a kind of video game. [Music] And let yourself experience it as something you're having fun doing, rearranging the pieces, putting them together so that the process becomes enjoyable. So just again, notice how quickly and easily you've been able to restructure your expectations of what you're doing and how it feels to do it. [Music] Four. [Music] Two. One. How you feeling? Good. I'm trying not to swear. I want to say that's crazy, but that's awesome. Wow, yeah, brilliant. Great. I'm really glad. [Music] To help with this goal, Dr. Spiegel has set me up with his app reverie so I can implement self-hypnosis as a daily

practice whenever I'm struggling to get focused on a project at work, or if I need to prepare myself for anything else that's going to be a challenge, like maybe my jump rope workouts. Visualizing my work like a video game, I want to see if gamifying my workouts can have the same effect. Today, for my workout, I'm going to be tracking my heart rate, calories, jumps, all on my watch, and I'm gonna take that information and try and beat it in every workout I do after for these next 30 days. And I'm gonna go for it. Today, I'm gonna set the tone intense to start. Let's do it. [Music] I'm doing 30 minutes of interval training, 45 seconds of skipping, followed by 15 to 30 seconds of rest, over and over and over. [Music] Every time I looked at my watch during that workout, it was like 175 heart rate, 180 heart rate. That was so hard, and if I have to top that every workout, I am going to be in trouble.

holy smokes with my plan to continue pushing myself with my workouts. My biggest concern right now is remaining consistent. So, I'm time blocking each day so I don't need to think about what comes next. I just check what's on the list and get back to work. [Music] Crossing off tasks again and again and again freaking go. That is three days in a row now where I've checked everything off my list. This is a pretty good start. It's a pretty good start. And while my day today is going well, I want to see how I do Under Pressure. So, at the end of my 30 days, I'm going to try the treadmill test, a Harvard study that was designed to test students' perseverance through a physically demanding challenge. And if my perseverance through week one is any indicator, I think I should be in a great place for this final test. I'm honestly killing it. I am working longer. I am accomplishing more with my time. Everything is going so well except for one thing every time I cross something

off my to-do list. My brain is like, Do we get a snack? Do I use my phone? Do we go for a walk? And I want to reach the point where I enjoy working hard and challenging myself without any reward attached. So to push myself towards that, I'm going to cut all short-term rewards from this next week. Hopefully, this helps get me into the mindset of just working for hard work's sake. And it did not go well. Rather than switching tasks after I completed one, I found with no reward to look forward to, I just lost all motivation and began stalling out. And it wasn't the only area where I was struggling. Turns out trying to set a personal best every day is actually pretty stupid. I need to go back to the drawing board in these workouts. This is foreign. [Music] Body feels so tired today, and I just feel like I'm headed towards another fall off, which is exactly the cycle that I'm trying to break here. And I was thinking about it earlier today, how I

was like the smart kid in school, and how I wasn't actually smart. I would just cram for the test two days before. Every test I would get an A, and then I would do nothing until the next test came around. Hard work for a short stint, and only for a reward. And here I am now, stuck in the exact same cycle. So I feel like this is the fight I need to win if I want to stop working for rewards and actually learn to enjoy effort. Gotta stay consistent to avoid burnout. I decided to scale back my trainings, that I'm only trying for a personal best once a week, with the rest of my workouts going at a moderate intensity. And even allowing myself a couple days to just go for a walk when I don't have the energy for a full workout. And rather than giving up rewards entirely through my work day, I start trying to work them in randomly rather than treating them like something I need every time I cross something off the list. While each of these changes does mean

the work I'm taking on is easier than I was originally planning. My ability to sustain effort consistently has actually never been better. In fact, the more I switch my focus to consistency, the more it feels like the way I think an approach work is starting to change. You might think of neuroplasticity a little bit like muscular plasticity. When you work out more, you build your muscles. The brain is a bit like that. It's a mental muscle where you can actually enhance the connections between neurons that make them work together by repeatedly firing them. Okay, we are day 25 in and things are going well. I'm pacing myself so much better without crashing. I'm working longer and harder, which means I'm actually staying on top of the things that I'm supposed to be doing. And when I'm looking back at the habits that I had six months ago, even three months ago, and comparing them to right now, things just seemed like they keep getting better and better. And it feels so good to actually be able to

say that, but do I actually love doing hard things. Today, we're gonna find out because today my friends and I are gonna try the treadmill test. For this challenge, we'll each try to run up to five minutes on a treadmill that's set to seven miles per hour and an incline of eight percent. The idea is that this pace should feel uncomfortable but not impossible for most of us to get through. The only question is how many of us will actually push through that discomfort and stay on until the end. Okay, here we go. Doesn't matter how long I walk or it's a two-hour walk into a five-minute run that's seven. Let's go, buddy. It's fast with all my friends going before I do. It's a great chance to find out just how difficult this test is going to be. That's pretty good, actually. And after two minutes, the fatigue starts to kick in. Close to three minutes are we. Oh my God, four in which left just two out of four runners who managed to stick it out for the entire five minutes.

nothing feeling pretty good yeah yeah that's a good workout and with my brother feeling it as much as he was I'm really gonna need to dig deep if I want to have any chance of making it all the way until the end seven now think about the practice you were about to engage in and what each part of your body needs to do to do it well for my run I decided to complete one more session of hypnosis to try and visualize myself going through this Challenge and to practice remaining calm no matter how bad I start to feel but as I reach the halfway point the speed really starts to get to me all right one minute left and after four minutes all I could do was just tell myself to try and breathe to try to keep going all right you got 30 seconds left 30 seconds that's nothing [Music] [Music] ah you all right I'm good I'm so good what was my time 25 seconds ah I'm not a sheep I need to get better next time I do this

even though I fell before the five-minute mark, I'm honestly proud to say that I gave it everything that I had. Rather than feeling discouraged by my failure, I genuinely feel motivated to keep training and try again. Over the past month, I've pushed myself in my workouts while also finding ways to stay consistent. My phone time also went down every single week this past month, which feels amazing. But by far the most noticeable improvement that I've seen is in my work. I cannot remember the last time I felt this focused, and it feels like a huge step towards being the person that I want to be. While I don't have the equipment to actually know if I've successfully rewired my brain, I feel like I'm genuinely learning to embrace challenges and to love taking on hard things. Now I just gotta stick with it. Before I go, I do want to thank Dr. Spiegel for chatting with me and for allowing me to try out his app, Reverie. Reverie has taken Dr. Spiegel's 40-plus

years of clinical research, and has condensed it into customized self-hypnosis sessions that you can use to help improve your focus, reduce stress, quit a bad habit, and so many other areas where you might want to control your thoughts and minds better. For me, reverie has been so helpful in preparing me for focused work. My brain oftentimes will start racing right before I'm supposed to start working, trying to latch on to any distraction that might allow me to procrastinate. But with reverie, I've been able to take hold of those feelings, calm down, and reframe how I'm going into my work, which has been an absolute game changer for me. Right now, reverie is offering a 30-day free all-access pass to you guys so you can give it a try for yourself to see if you like it. So go to the link in the description to try reverie for 30 days. And yeah, hopefully it helps you take control of your mind and the way you think like it has for me. So thanks for watching. I'll see you in the

How I Rewired My Brain to Enjoy Hard Work - (Neuroplasticity)

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