How To Get Unstuck | 7 Habits To Break the Cycle

Do you feel stuck in life right now? Most people at some point in life get stuck. And you don't just get stuck at some point in life. You actually get stuck very often at different points in your life. And I'm going to be sharing with you seven really powerful ideas to not just help you get unstuck, but to help you improve yourself in a cycle of rapid performance towards your goal or the ultimate vision of how you want your life to be. This advice is fairly unusual and it comes from my experience having built the world's number one transformation platform, mindvalley, but also in interviews I've done with close to a thousand thought leaders, professors and experts in the world of human performance. And if you already feel like things in your life are going swimmingly well, this video is going to help you swim better. My name is Vishen, I'm the founder of mindvalley and I'm delighted to be sharing these ideas with you. Number one, guess what's the most important muscle in your body? It's your brain. But most of us do not care for our brain. We do things that actually reduce brain health. You want to ensure that you're getting good sleep and you want to take the right supplements and you want to avoid things which are bad for your brain, such as alcohol. Let's talk about sleep for a moment. In a study of army sharpshooters, if someone requires seven hours of sleep and they instead get six, their accuracy in the range goes down from 90% to approximately 50%. Even an hour loss of sleep can take down your brain's ability to think, to analyze, to process data. So if you focus on force yourself to wake up earlier than you need because you need to rush into work. Know that your work that day is going to be significantly lower quality than if you simply gave yourself a good night's sleep. Never, ever compromise sleep. The number one health practice in the world, you guessed it, is sleep. Your brain needs it. You need to take supplements because the nutritional density of our food has been falling. For example, according to Naveen Jain, the brilliant founder of Viome, the gut testing AI company, an avocado today has 1/8 the nutritional density of an avocado in the 1980s. Think about that. This is why taking the right supplements is extremely important. Because the right supplements can improve your mood, improve your energy and improve your focus. There are many great supplements that have a profound impact on your brain. GABA and 5 HTP actually elevate your mood and lower your response to stress. Magnesium and melatonin help you sleep better. Alpha GPC is amazing for focus. All of these are extremely affordable and available in any supplement store on Amazon. Look into these supplements. Finally, this is going to be tricky for some of you. Let's talk about alcohol. Many friends I know have completely given up alcohol. And when I ask them why, they say because they've started to notice that when they drink they sleep worse. And this causes them to wake up feeling a little bit tired. And it also causes them to to lose mental performance. The next day they actually notice that their thinking quality goes down. Dr. Daniel Amen, who's the world's leading brain doctor, told me that every time you drink alcohol, you're literally killing brain cells. People who drink every day have a smaller brain. Alcohol is essentially a mild form of poison. And every time you take alcohol the very next day you will see a decrease in productivity. If your time is worth, say $300 an hour and alcohol causes a 30 minute decrease in productivity, well, guess what, that drink you 150 bucks. Is that worth it? Now this brings us to the second idea. And this comes from a book called the Four Disciplines of Execution. So firstly, this is an incredible book that I've made every manager working at my company read. One of the disciplines in this book is the discipline of two hours of allocated time every week to learning and growing. Why do people get stuck? We get stuck because we're not actually growing our knowledge. We're not actually learning. No matter what field you're in, you, you can learn to get better. If you're a writer, you can attend writing workshops. If you're an actor, you constantly should be attending acting classes to get better and better as an actor. But many of us forget that we fall into the hustle and the grind rather than carving aside time to get better, you need to block off two hours on your calendar. And in those two hours you're not allowed to work. Rather, what you have to do is study how to get better at your work. You can let your work bleed into anything else, but your work should never bleed into your study time and you will be shocked at how fast you grow. This two hours is non negotiable. Go to your calendar right now and figure out what are those two hours a week you can block off for your non negotiable learning time. They don't have to be a connected two hours. They could be two disconnected one hour slots. But go to your calendar right now before you do anything else and block out that time. In those two hours you could be watching more YouTube videos. You, you could be checking out content on Mindvalley. You could be reading a book. But in this two hour slot, this is where the magic happens. Number three is probably something really unusual because you're gonna see that being stuck can actually be to your advantage. This idea comes from George Lennard's book, Mastery. Now, in his book, George shared this idea. Progress does not flow in a linear way. Rather, it flows like a step ladder. You have a leap and then it stagnates. You have a leap and then it stagnates. You have a leap and then it stagnates. But we're not really stagnating, we're stabilizing. If you were just constantly growing, the change could be really disruptive. Think about reptiles. Reptiles don't perpetually shed their skin. They grow, they shed their skin, then they stay with that skin for several years before their next growth spurt. You can't be continuously shedding skin by understanding the concept of the stepladder. We put less stress on ourselves during those moments where, where you are stabilizing. Now, the fourth rule, the 4% rule, by Steven Kotler. Steven Kotler is a dear friend and he's written many remarkable books. His program, Habit of Ferocity is one of the most amazing programs available in Mindvalley. Now Kotler, in one of his speeches, introduced me to the idea called the 4% rule. He said, if you want to grow in any field, you want to be able to enter flow states where you are so engrossed in your work that you are growing, you're getting better, and you are excited about the work you do. You. And there's a simple rule for this. All this ensure that the projects you're working on are roughly 4% harder than what you think you're capable of. The 4% harder rule puts you at just the right zone where the project is challenging enough, where you can develop flow and you can grow. So always seek to do things at a level that's 4% harder than what you're capable of. A simple way to do this is a timer. For example, if you're a writer and you write blog posts or you write chapters for a book, if you know that a particular blog post or article might take you eight hours, seek to do it in seven hours and 45 minutes. That will push you to deliver your article within the constraints of that 4% rule. It gives you the right amount of challenge that puts you in flow but causes you to grow because you have to think of new processes, new creativity, Pathways, new ways to get your output done in a tighter timeframe of time. As a result, you get better and better faster. Rule number five. Treat your body and brain with respect. You got to think of yourself as an athlete. No matter what you do, you are not just that which you do. You are a human being in a human body, meaning a mind powered by a brain and a physical body. You do not want to in any way sacrifice your physical body or your mental prowess. You always want to make sure that your physical body and your brain are operating at peak potential. Much the same way an athlete takes such good care of of their body. You need to treat your body and brain with respect. And this means not just avoiding stuff that's bad for you, but doing stuff that keeps your body and brain sharp. Meditation, having a schedule for exercise, for yoga, for practices that put you in a great state, will all make you more productive. Meditation takes 20 minutes a day. Exercise can be done in 15 minutes a day. This may take 30 minutes or so a day, but these 30 minutes will probably add one to two hours that same day in extra productivity. Number six is simple. Avoid injury. You see this little red mark on my nose? Well, it may be a little bit more obvious if we were sitting in person. About a month ago, I was feeling a bit sick in my apartment. I had eaten something that was off and I had developed food poisoning. And I knew this, but I was still hustling and busy with work. I got out of my apartment, crossed the street to go to a restaurant for a business meeting. At the restaurant I started feeling sick and I knew that I needed to go and collapse in bed, but I didn't even have enough energy to walk out the restaurant. As I was walking out the restaurant, I lost consciousness. I fell down, hit my face against some potted plants, fractured my nose. I was so obsessed with my goal that I forgot to take care of myself. If you're not getting enough sleep, if you're working even when you're sick and not giving your body rest, then you are for failing. You may be pushing a little bit extra to get greater movement towards your goal in the short term, but you are hurting yourself in the long term. What this means is if you need downtime, embrace that downtime. I'm not saying be lazy, but I'm saying you got to prioritize sleep, exercise, healthy eating and rest and relaxation when your body needs it. Avoid injury. You're playing a long term game here. Number seven is self love. Do you know what is the single most important practice that has the highest correlation with overall human well being. It's gratitude. A scientific study showed that if you practice gratitude for 30 days. This means for 30 days just sitting still in meditation or journaling things that you appreciate about yourself and your work. At the end of 30 days, you see your happiness levels go up by 25%. But here's the crazy part. Nine months later in that study, people who practice gratitude over the control group, their happiness levels were still higher. Gratitude is a form of self love. Start your day by sitting still or journaling and think about three things that you're grateful for in your personal life. Three things that you're grateful for in your work life. This simple practice can have a profound impact in your day. So there you have it. 7 Habits that can help you get unstuck I hope these ideas are interesting. If you want to go and explore any of these ideas further, you might want to get a membership on mindvalley. For just a really low price, equivalent to what you'd pay for a Netflix subscription, you get access to hundreds of the world's greatest programs in personal development. And one of the programs that you may want to start with, if you like this particular video, is the Six Phase Meditation. This is a meditation protocol I created that's being used by top performers around the world, and the Six Phase Meditation actually trains your brain to ensure that you're perpetually performing in a peak state. Go check it out on mindvalley.com thank you. And if you like this video, please click subscribe and leave a comment. Let us know which of these habits that you find have the biggest impact in your life. Thank you.