A short YouTube micro-class by Brian Johnson on homeostasis and adaptability. Johnson explains how homeostasis creates a comfort zone and how repeatedly stepping slightly outside that zone (the stretch zone) triggers physiological and neural adaptation—extending one’s baseline ability—citing Anders Ericsson and neuroscience examples (e.g., London taxi drivers’ enlarged hippocampi). The video closes with practical advice to consistently, safely exit the comfort zone and a brief pitch for Johnson’s membership platform.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another micro class. This one's on homeostasis plus adaptability. It's inspired by peak secrets from the new science of expertise, Anders Ericsson. We've talked about the gift, we've talked about practice so far in this little microclass series. Now we're going to talk about one of the key aspects of practice that I mentioned was leaving your comfort zone. So here's your comfort zone.
Boop.
That's you living inside your comfort zone. Now, what's interesting is we want to use something called homeostasis to our advantage. So you basically, in every individual, live at a basic homeostatic point where everything's mellow and your body is constantly working to keep you at a home homeostatic point. Right. Homeostasis is extraordinarily important. Every single cell in your body is regulating itself to achieve homeostasis.
Right?
Your blood sugar, your blood pressure, your.
Pulse rate, blah, blah, blah.
Now, that's great. And it's important for stability, right? There's your stability. You're nice and strong. Strong foundation, et cetera.
Right?
And we want to use that to our advantage. And what happens is, if you go outside of your comfort zone, whether that's deciding to run three miles three times a week, if you've never run before, or meditating for 20 minutes a day and bringing your attention back to an anchor point that's outside of your comfort zone, you're not used to doing that. Now, what's amazing is, because our bodies are so committed to homeostasis, what happens when we do this and we challenge ourselves by pushing ourselves outside of our current limit? And again, I'm not talking about up here. That's the snap zone, not the stretch zone. We want to just go outside of our comfort zone a little bit.
Right?
When we do that and we go for that run, our body inside has a little voice going on that says, hey, wait. Okay, you want me to do this? You want me to be able to run? You want me to be able to lift this weight? Well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make ourselves a little bit stronger. I'm going to overcompensate is the technical word for it. And what happens then is our comfort zone gets extended. Okay, you want me to do that more consistently? Well, let's set a new baseline. Let's set a new homeostasis. That's how you use adaptability to harness the power of homeostasis. Then what happens? Well, then you exit your comfort zone again and Your comfort zone catches up and you do it again. And you do it again. And you do it again. George Mumford in the Mindful Athlete called this romancing your discomfort zone. When we apply it to homeostasis, we see the science of why you need to exit your comfort zone. And Anders Ericsson makes the incredibly direct point. If you never leave your comfort zone, you will never improve, period. Improvement occurs on the other side of your comfort zone again. We've heard that a ton of times. It's really cool to see the science of it and why homeostasis and adaptability work together. Now, when we do this with our bodies, it's very obvious, right?
Right.
We see our muscles grow, et cetera, but it's happening in our minds as well. Most people call it when we adapt in our minds, they call it neuroplasticity. Our brains are plastic.
Right.
Our brains can grow and evolve in a similar fashion as our muscles. Obviously very different actual mechanics, but we can adapt. And he talks about a bunch of research. London taxi drivers, for example, have a hippocampus region that's significantly larger than non taxi drivers. Cause they have to manage all of this visual spatial information. That's truly crazy. And their brains changed just as if they were working out their biceps. Right. Point being, get out of your comfort zone. Trigger adaptability by working with the general principles of stable systems homeostasis.
That was fun. I hope you enjoyed.
Here's to healthfully exiting our comfort zone. And again, remember, it's just a little bit. You don't need to go nuts and injure yourself or burn yourself out. But what you do need to do is consistently step outside, step outside, step outside. And let the compounding benefit of that occur over an extended period of time.
Hey, guys, this is Brian. A lot of people don't know what I do beyond these YouTube videos I put up. So I thought I'd give you a quick tour of our membership platform. Thousands of people have joined us already. 10 bucks a month get access to a ton of stuff that's in addition to what I put up on YouTube for free. So the basic idea is you just watched a micro class. Hope you enjoyed that. I share. I just started doing these micro classes, but I Now share over 50 of these per month. We've shared dozens so far, and it's basically a quick class on my absolute favorites off across the different domains of optimal living. 2 to 3 maybe 5 minute little micro classes on how to optimize your life. In addition to that, you get access to every single one of our Philosopher's Notes. We now have over 250 Philosopher's Notes on some really, really good books. A lot of them in each one of them. You're familiar with the PNTV videos if you've watched many of those. But we also have PDFs and MP3s of our Philosopher's Notes.
So here's.
Let's take a look at what a PDF looks like. This is an example of a Philosopher's Note. It's a six page PDF where I basically share some of my favorite thoughts, riff on it, talk about how other teachers say the same things, and give you a nice playful kick in the butt to go out and apply the wisdom that is a Philosopher's Note. I record that as an MP3 that you can download as well. And 250 of those, I produce 10 of those at least per month that I share with you in addition to the micro classes. And then you also get access to all of our old classes. We have the five day immersion reboot habits 101, confidence 101, getting stuff done 101, meditation 101, then future classes including relationships 101, energy 101, purpose 101, biz 101 goals 101, etc. So there you go. Really blessed to have some extraordinary support and I will share with you where you go to sign up. I'll put a link to this, but basically cruise on over here. You can sign up. And this is the kind of response we've gotten so far from our members.
It's pretty neat.
I've made more positive changes in my life. My brief membership only 3 months so far than I did through years of counseling. Yes. Brian Johnson, you are a rock star. Thank you very much. That's very kind of you. And I'm making huge strides in optimizing my life. As a result of your Philosopher's Notes and optimal living classes, I spend $19 a month on my gym membership to take care of my body. A mere $10 a month on an Optimal Living membership is the biggest value invest investment I've ever made in my emotional, mental and spiritual health. Thank you for the incredible work you're doing to inspire us to be rock stars in our own lives. Unbelievably inspiring and humbling. In 24 hours we received hundreds of extraordinary notes from members around the world. So there you go. That's a quick look at what we're up to. 10 bucks a month. Hope to astonish you. There you go.
