This is an audio-only podcast episode by Dr. Nicole Cain introducing six "success hacks" intended to reduce stress, overwhelm, and anxiety while improving productivity and life satisfaction. The episode emphasizes that the brain benefits from strategies and rituals but that rituals alone are insufficient; the host will present six concrete hacks to make rituals effective.
Chapters
Have you ever wondered how people like Elon Musk are able to run several companies and still have time to throw giant parties with knife throwers and fire sticks? Do you feel like you're swamped with to do's and no end in sight? Have you ever wondered how you can work smarter and not harder so that you can still stop, overwhelm and turn the page? And finally, starting a chapter where you're calling the shots, not your stress and overwhelm. No matter where you are in life, whether you're simply trying to survive or if you're looking to level up on your productivity, this episode is a must. Listen Today we're going to take a look at the top six success hacks that will change your life welcome to my podcast. I'm Dr. Nicole Cain, a naturopathic doctor with a master's in Clinical psychology and a former anxiety sufferer turned anxiety Freedom Rebel. There are three main points in this podcast. First, your brain likes strategies and rituals. Second, strategies and rituals in and of themselves won't work. You need the six hacks I'm going to teach you today. And third, the six hacks you're going to learn today will help you to reduce stress, reduce overwhelm, reduce anxiety, and pivot you away from worrying about what your life will be like if things don't change. These hacks will increase your productivity. They will increase your sense of calm and pave the way for more income, more satisfaction, and more opportunities to create a meaningful contribution in the world in the way that you feel called so let's start with expanding on the topic of strategies and rituals, including what they are and why they are not enough. Ritual is a word that means ceremony, or a dance or or a performed series of actions according to a premeditated order. Our brains thrive with ritual. The concept of ritual goes back to our earliest records of human history, and rituals have been observed in all known human societies. Rituals add a richness to the human experience and structure to a brain that has the capacity to receive the 11 million bits per second of information from the body. And that does not even include the data coming into your brain from your environment. Whether you're a planner or enjoy the whimsical freedom of flying by the seat of your pants, your brain needs ritual or structure. If you aren't intentional on drawing the map for how you think and feel and function, your brain will create it for you. Here's an example of a ritual that I commonly see in my consultation clients and let's be real, myself sometimes too Wake up. Check email, panic at 300 unread emails and then stagger out of bed, chug coffee, scroll through morning news, panic over the President's latest tweet, check your watch, realize you're late, shove a burrito down your gullet, and leap into the car with your T shirt on inside out. Okay, so maybe it's not always that extreme. But seriously, look at your daily routine. When do you wake up? What's typically the first thing you think of? What do you do? What is your initial impulse, and what is your ritual? Your brain loves habits. In fact, I did a whole podcast on how your brain loves habits so so much that the Average person spends 95% of their time on autopilot. This if it's shocking to you, as it was to me, check out my podcast entitled Wake up how to wake up and live the life you were meant to live. And rituals cut down the input of noise going into the brain so that the brain can concentrate on whatever is most important in that moment, so that in those small moments when it's not on autopilot, it has the bandwidth to think about what really matters to you. Having rituals is evolutionarily favorable. For example, let's say that you are gathering in a forest and a hungry bear comes out of the bushes. In order to keep you alive, your brain goes into what is called autonomic arousal, where even before you have engaged in any critical thinking, your muscles are primed to run, your heart is pounding and sending more oxygen and nutrients to your muscles, your airways open and are ready to.
