#3772: Your Brain Needs "Alone" Time

0:00Some people recalibrate before things drift. Others wait for feedback they can't undo. Power presence calibration exists for the first group. It is not designed to be welcoming. The location is listed below in the description. If you're looking for shortcuts, hacks or inspiration that wears off by Lensdum, this is not for you. But if you want practical ideas that help you think better, lead better, and execute more consistently, get my free daily game email, one message every day right to your inbox at workonmygame.com. That's workonmygame.com. Your mind does not need more information nearly as often as it needs uninterrupted time to process what it already knows. This is Dre Baldwin and workon your game is the system that turns discipline into dominance.

1:02Today's topic is your brain needs quiet time, a long time, time with no inputs. These days, most of us never allow our minds any time to operate without constant input or output. Talking, recording, videoing, vlogging, vlogging, posting, replying, texting, those are the outputs and the inputs. You know the inputs are email, text messages, any kind of audio, music, podcasts, what else videos, another human being, either inputting or outputting at all times and eventually our brain starts to feel a little bit of burnout because they're just always doing something you don't get any time to regroup and sometimes this can happen on a micro level like day to

2:07day at the end of the day your brain just feels burnt out because you were just taking in so much stuff and doing so much stuff and in the macro. And the long run over the course of months or years, you can eventually feel this burnout because your brain never has a chance to just be awake and alert but not engaged directly engaged with something coming in or you having to put something out, it can be engaged but engaged just internally having your own thoughts just with your own, your brain with itself, let's put it that way. This is what people do when they're doing meditation exercises. I mean, this is what people do when they do mindfulness exercises. I don't know exactly what the exercises are from mindfulness but meditation definitely is designed as a time to steal the mind. Don't have anything coming in. Don't focus on trying to put anything out. Just let your thoughts be as they are. Let them go where they're going to go. And one of my favorite books is The 50th Law by Robert Green.

3:10One of the chapters of that book is becoming comfortable with boredom and the concept is about mastery. And that chapter of that book was a precursor to the book that Robert Green wrote. I believe it might have been his next book and he wrote a book literally called Mastery which is all about how people become masters and experts at what they do and how it's a lifelong process is not just this one time thing. One of the things that Robert talks about and that chapter on boredom is that a lot of human beings we've conditioned ourselves and by the way that book came out in like 2010. A lot of people have conditioned themselves to not be able to sit alone in a room with no inputs and not doing any output and just exist there. And for the most part, a lot of us don't do any of that. Present company included. I do a lot of outputting. I'm recording here right now when I'm talking to you. And I take in a lot. I listen to audio, music. I listen to podcasts.

4:10I listen to videos. I do Zoom calls. I am writing. I put articles out every day. I publish stuff to social media often but I publish the social or clips from this very show. But I'll publish on X written material just thoughts. I'll reply to stuff that I see news stories. Get my opinion on current events. I do a lot of outputting and I take in a lot. And when you think back, for those of you who are, you had to have been an adult or coast to an adult. If you were age, no, you had to have been that old. Let's say you were up to age 12 to 15 in 2000 and I say 2005. So if you were born in like any time early nine years or earlier. So you were born in 1993 or sooner. 1993 or before 1993. And if you whose birth year is 1993 or before that, you know what it felt like to be bored.

5:14You don't have anything to do. You don't have anyone to talk to. You are not watching TV or listening to the radio or music. You weren't talking to anybody. And you were just with your thoughts. Whatever you were doing, you were just with your thoughts. Those of you who are that age, you remember walking to the store. With nothing you weren't listening to anything. You didn't have a phone to look at because there were no phones, smartphones at least. And you just walked to the store. It took you 15 minutes to walk there. You went to the store, did your business and you walked that with no engagement during the walk. And that was normal. Do you remember that? When's the last time you did that? Those of the last time you spent 15 minutes awake doing something, but you were not doing something like walkie must say, but you're not taking in anything. You're not listening to anything, not looking at anything on your hand, like a device or anything in your ear. And then 15 minutes the other way, just 30 minutes total with no engagement to your brain.

6:16You might even think, yes, thinking is fine. Talking to yourself, I guess that's kind of fine, but nothing else. Most of the last time you did that, we don't do that anymore. And my argument here today is that the brain needs this space. Brain needs this space to make sense of everything it has taken in and maybe make sense of the things is put out there. It needs time to breathe on his own. It just needs some space. Can it just breathe? Can your brain breathe without inputs constantly? It has to make sense of an organise and outputs that it has to continue to organise before they come out of you. Hopefully they're organising some way before you say them. Many people never get their brains to space anymore because we're bombarded with, well, if we choose to be bombarded, let me say that we choose to be bombarded with a constant feed of material. If you go on any social media app from YouTube to Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and you just scroll and scroll and scroll. Just keep scrolling. The feed will never end.

7:17It was just keep giving you material for as long as you're going to keep scrolling. There is no end to it. And it's more stimulating to the eyeballs and to the pleasure sensors of the brain to feed ourselves whatever is in that feed. Then it would be to put the phone down or turn the phone off and just deal with ourselves. That's the reason why people don't do it. The people who've created these applications and these platforms, these are scientists. They are engineers. These people are really smart. And you know exactly how the brain works and you know exactly what triggers the brain to want more of a thing. It's like a drug. These things are addictions, folks. I'm not exaggerating what I call an addiction. Some of your clearist thinking, this is the argument for what I'm saying here today. Your clearist thinking happens when you are not consuming and you're just observing. Just watching, but not consuming anything, not taking anything in.

8:17You've heard me talk about the power presence. Oh, no, we have the power presence protocol over here. You learn more about that in the description to this episode down below. The power presence is rooted in my observation of and subsequent interest in animals who are predators, alligators, lions, tigers, eagles, hawks. I've always been interested in animals, specifically interested in predators and how they do what they do, why they do what they do and how other animals respond to them, how even people respond to predator animals. Even when they're not doing any predator stuff, when there's just existing and how they exist. And one thing you know to be true about all animals, predators are not even the prey animals that they try to kill and eat is that animals don't have smartphones. They don't have air pods in their ears. They don't listen to podcasts. They don't watch YouTube videos, but they seem to live full and fulfilling lives, even though they don't have these

9:24objects constantly giving them something to pay attention to. And we should think about what that means and how it relates to us as human beings, not saying that we need to become animals, but there are some things that animals do that we could actually learn from point number one today's topic once again is your brain these time to itself with nothing coming in number one silence creates the space for mental processing. A lot of your mental processing happens when you are sleeping. This is the reason why you need to go through the different stages of sleep from light sleep to deep sleep to dream, sequencing sleep. You need to go through these stages of sleep because this is when your body repairs itself, your brain repairs itself. This is when memories get etched into the subconscious and it's also when all the data and information you took in over the course of the day gets synthesized in your mind to be stored where it needs to be stored. It's kind of like you go to grocery store and you got bags for groceries, you put them down in your kitchen, but eventually you got to take all the groceries out of the bags and you got to put them away. Well, that's what your brain is normally sleeping. It's taking all the groceries out of the bags and putting them in their proper places. So if you don't get proper sleep, your brain never gets to process and synthesize all the information that you've been taking it. So some of it happens on sleep.

10:34But you can also do it when you're awake and when you have a conscious choice as to what to do with certain information and you can consciously think about, okay, now that I know that, what does that mean for this? How does it relate to this? What does it mean for this piece over here? Can't do that while you're sleeping because you can't consciously think only your unconscious working subconscious working on your sleep. Well, you don't have this silence that I'm talking about. This means no phone, no music, no podcast, no screen. None of these things competing for attention and your mind actually having space to organize your thoughts, which is what I just talked about. This is where clarity emerges. Clarity emerges when inputs stop. It's hard to gain clarity on a subject when you're continually giving yourself input after input after input because the brain every time you give it a new input is like bringing another bag in from the trunk of your car from the grocery store. Well, you never have a chance to actually eat the food that you bought at the grocery store because you got to keep putting more stuff away. Eventually, you got to stop putting stuff away so you can figure out what to do with all the food. Okay, now you got a full refrigerator. You got a full pantry now. Okay, now you got to cook something, but you can't cook if you got to keep putting stuff away.

11:40That's how the brain is working when you're continually giving it more inputs. The clarity emerges when you give it yourself space. You will notice that many times you'll have breakthrough ideas in life when you first wake up in the morning, no inputs yet. When you're falling asleep at night, no inputs at that time when you're in between awake and falling asleep. When you're doing mindless things that don't require conscious processing such as in the middle of a tough workout. You're not looking at a phone. You're not constantly thinking about anything. You're just going through the workout. When you are brushing your teeth, shaving, combing your hair, getting dressed in the morning, salary, getting in the shower out of the shower, during shower. Why do you get these breakthrough ideas at those times because you're awake and alert yet you are not consciously processing. That's one of the subconscious mind can finally take all the work it's been doing in the background and deliver its message to you. But the subconscious mind cannot deliver its message when your conscious mind is dominating the conversation. In other words, the conscious mind doesn't shut the fuck up.

12:45Then your subconscious mind cannot speak to you. They speak at two different volumes and the subconscious can never shout down the conscious, but the conscious often does shout down the subconscious. But you have to shut the conscious up to let the subconscious say what it has to say. Point number two today's topic once again is your brain needs time with nothing coming in number two observation sharpens awareness. This is what I was talking about with the animals. If you think about an animal like a lion, a tiger, a hawk, an eagle, an alligator. If you go to the zoo with these animals, usually they're not doing anything and just sitting there watching. Now they're in a zoo so they're not actually hunting in the zoo, but if they were out in the wild, you watch on national geographic. You see these animals spend a lot of time doing the same thing. They don't usually show that in the show because that be a pretty boring show to just watch an animal just sitting there doing nothing. But that's what they spend most of their time doing. Alligator can sit still in the water for hours without moving. Hawk or eagle owls. They will sit for hours on a perch just watching the floor of the forest or wherever they're hunting. A lion will do the same thing. They will sit for hours just waiting for the gazelle or the buffalo or whatever to run by so that they can get ready for their hunt.

13:58A lot of these animals hunt by stealth. They don't slow we walk you down. They wait to get close enough that when they do go after you, they get themselves the best possible chance of catching you, which means they have to sit really still and not do anything for a long time to wait for you to come into their attack zone. That's observation and sharpness awareness. These animals have to be very, very sharp and very aware because if these predator animals don't catch anything, well they die. So when they catch things, the things they catch die, but if they don't catch anything, the predator they die. So it was a literal life for deaf for them. Their ability to observe and have sharp awareness. The term is what they live or die between next week and this week. Watching your surroundings without distraction trains you to notice things. Him and beings. We are really good at picking up details when we are trained to pay attention. A lot of us we have conditioned ourselves to not pay attention. We have the natural ability to pay attention, but when we are always looking at our phones, you see people these days walking down the street while looking at their phones and not even looking at the people that they're walking past and they're looking at their phones.

14:59You see people walking into other people because they're looking at their phones and then they walk around the person that they almost walked into and never even look up to say, oh damn excuse me. No, this is keep walking. You see people on trains on buses just on their phones the whole time not even noticing who's around them. Someone will sit down right next to you ride for 10 stops, get up and get off and you never even look down. You only know who that was. This skill of observation, we all have it. If we train ourselves to get acquainted with it again, we only have to learn how to have it. You already got it. Wanting your surroundings without distraction, you start noticing things, you notice patterns, you notice details, notice opportunities, things that constant stimulation causes you to miss when you're always being simulated by something else, you don't notice the things that are around you where you're actually at. You only notice the environment that's there. Presence begins with paying attention, everybody. When I talk about the power presence, go back to those animals, lions, tigers, alligators, hawks, eagles, these predator animals, notice that they don't get caught by some bros for the most part.

16:13Most of the time they're not the ones getting caught, they're the ones catching everybody else. Why did they catch everybody else? Did they just have some special superpower that causes them to catch others rather than others to catch them? No. The reason they are usually the ones doing the catching is because they are able to sit in calm observation and sharp awareness for extended periods of time. They're able to sit long enough that the opportunities eventually come onto their radar. That's how it works. An owl catches a mouse, not because a mouse doesn't pay attention, it might pay very close attention because they've got to make sure they don't get caught and eat their prey. They're always flitting around and looking and noticing and they run away at the sound of leaves rustling 15 feet away because they know that might mean they might get eaten by something they go running. But when they start moving around, the owl is already watching. The mouse comes around because it has to find food, the owl is waiting for the mouse so it can become food.

17:14They just do it for longer and they can hold their attention for a longer period without fissioning, physically, mentally, emotionally, fissioning. The mice can't help but the fission. That's why the owl ends up winning. Well, when it catches the mouse, the mouse still can get away sometimes. The presence begins to pay attention, folks. If you ever see a police officer on duty, not having a conversation with a bunch of other cops in a group, but a police officer who is active on duty, one thing you'll notice by the police officers, you never see them looking at their phone. They're not staring down at their phone, scrolling while they're on duty. They are usually just observing and paying attention to this, watching the scene. They're looking to the left and to the right, they're watching what people are doing. They're watching everything happening. Just being aware, eyes up head up, just being aware, aware, and alert of what's going on. Not because they're about to do anything, but then being aware and alert creates a presence that you notice. When someone is just in one spot, not moving, but they're aware and alert and looking around, you tend to notice their presence just because they're noticing you.

18:24It's always noticing you, you tend to notice them. It's an interesting phenomenon of living things. Now, if they're not moving at all, then you may not notice them. Again, this is how the hawk and the alligator and the lion are able to kill things. But if there's some life in their body and they're moving around, they're showing them the life of a police officer looking left and right, you notice that they're standing there, even if they're not doing anything. That's where a presence starts, paying attention. A lot of people are so caught up in their own myopic world of what you're thinking or what's on your damn phone screen that you're not paying attention to what's happening around you. Your presence immediately lowers as soon as you look down at that phone. Any of you who's out in public, your presence immediately lowers as soon as you look down at that phone. Everybody heard that? Power presence calibration is not offered publicly. It is not explained. It is not scaled. It exists for people whose position already carries cost. Everyone else should move on.

19:25The reference point is in the episode notes. Point number three. Today's topic once again is your brain needs time with no inputs. Number three, your best idea is need empty space. You have a good idea. First thing you got to do is let your brain play with the idea. Your brain is the most potent tool known to man. More powerful than anything on your computer. But your brain needs time and space to play with what you gave it. Insight rarely appears when you're consuming information. Insight appears when you're doing nothing. Right? This is what I said. When you're in the shower, you're brushing your teeth, you just woke up, you're about to fall asleep, you're in the middle of a workout, you're driving. So work the same route you're driven a thousand times. That's when you get great ideas because the conscious mind is quiet because you don't need it in that moment. The best idea is come from that empty space. When you have a great idea, it needs empty space to so that your brain can play around with the idea and say, okay, here's how we can build on that or here's why that will work. Here's why this won't work. Here's what we can do with that.

20:28The best idea is need the space. Insight cannot appear while you're consuming information because the conscious mind is occupied, organizing information or deciding what do we filter out, what do we keep, what do we need to know, does this matter, what does this say about this? The conscious mind has to work when you're giving it inputs. There's nothing wrong making a mind work. A lot of people don't make a mind do anything. That's the problem as well. But insight needs space. It can't appear again when you're consuming those quiet moments walking, sitting, watching your child at the park, falling asleep, just waking up, brushing your teeth. That's when the idea has gone because you have nothing else demanding your attention. And if you don't give your brain to space, doesn't mean your brain is going to stop working. It just won't do as best work. It needs space. Same way you're stomach needs space. So your stomach is not going to be a good shape. Just keep feeding it food. You've got to give it some time of giving it nothing. Because if it's always working, eventually it gets tired. It needs some space, some relax time. It needs a break. It needs an off day, not a whole day, but the same way an employee does not going to work every single day without stopping every once in a while in you to day off for a break or a cigarette break or a lunch break.

21:33Same thing your brain needs. Brain needs a lunch break every now and then from the consumption recap in today's class, which is brain needs time with nothing coming in. Number one, reduce input to improve thinking. If thinking gets better when you stop taking in information, not when you take in more of it. Number two, attention grows through observation. Number one, rule of presence is to pay attention. When you're paying attention, your presence goes up because you are noticing everything happening around you. You are literally present in the space. If you look down at your phone, you are no longer present. You are in the world of the phone rather than the world that you're actually standing in. Number three, insight requires space to emerge. You've got to give insight space so it can show itself to you. Final thought, your mind does not need more information nearly as often as it needs uninterrupted time to process what it already knows. Work on your game. Drey, all day. You already know what to do. The question is, why aren't you doing it consistently? ERI, the execution, reliability index, quantifies the gap between knowledge and execution. No guessing, no excuses.

22:37Get your score at workonyourgame.com slash ERI. That's workonyourgame.com slash ERI.