🔺5 Toxic Habits That Destroy Your Brain — Here’s What to Do Instead Commit to A Clear, Seemingly Impossible Goal

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Your brain can either work for you or against you.

It does and looks for whatever you tell it.

If you commit to pursuing a clearly defined, seemingly impossible goal, you’ll attract all the necessary resources to make it happen.

Your transformation starts in the supercomputer between your ears.

You can decide to learn skills that are completely beyond your current level, or you can decide to get trapped in a slow cycle of counterproductive habits.

One makes your brain fit and healthy, and the other destroys it — I’m sure you can guess which is which.

Read also: 7 habits of people who become financially stable in their 30’s and 40’s according to psychology 

The point I’m making is how you deploy your brain is your choice.

We live in a time when it’s easier than ever to build habits conducive to where you want to go in life.

We know more, and we’re equipped with more. This makes us more advanced than ever.

Yet, most people choose a life of distraction.

Their habits are toxic, and they destroy their brain.

As a result, they’re unable to make meaningful progress toward a happier, more fulfilling life.

In this story, I’ll help you become aware of 5 of those toxic habits.

I’ll also give you the tools to train your brain to work in your favor.

If you follow these tips, you’ll know exactly how to get the results you want for yourself.

1. Procrastinating in the morning

“Start right. If you keep doing what was started right, it will result in a right ending.”

— Zain Hashmi

How you train your brain is how you will be.

Most people train their brains to procrastinate — and it’s usually unintentional.

But your brain doesn’t care whether you deliberately configured it to be the way it is or not; It just listens to whatever you tell it to do.

Here’s the thing: you can’t get into flow when you’ve conditioned your brain to be slow.

Your brain will always be distracted and never fully immersed in your actions.

It doesn’t help that society has trained and wired us for consumption.

The other day, someone said to me, “What’s the point of having a phone if you’re going to put it on DND,” because their call to me didn’t go through — all they wanted was to ask to borrow something for a social media picture.

Most people around you are trapped in consumption.

They NEED it if they’re able to get going in the morning.

But this conditions you to procrastinate.

When you wake up and grab your phone to start consuming, you’re instantly scattering your brain.

You’re confusing your priorities.

Once your priorities get confused, you involve yourself in more than your brain can manage before you start the real work you’re supposed to do.

Not only does this create unnecessary distractions, it also cripples your odds of success.

Benjamin Hardy once said, “Being distracted makes you busy. Being busy makes your brain slow.”

When your brain is slow, you procrastinate and eventually feel bad about yourself.

Instead of procrastinating in the morning, it’s far healthier and more effective to wake up with clarity on your most important task for the day and then spend the first few hours hacking away at it.

Mark Twain calls this eating the frog.

He said, “If you have to eat a live frog, do it first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day.”

By completing your most important task first thing in the morning, you can train your brain to be proactive and remain in a state of flow.

Note that “most important task” means life-changing work.

For example, the first few things I do in the morning are get out of bed right after waking, take a leak, write in my journal, and then start writing on Medium.

There’s no delay in action.

I’ve primed my brain to do what it needs to do when it needs to do it.

My first thought is to create rather than consume.

When you start working on your most important tasks first, your brain deviates toward action.

You stop procrastinating.

You get your first few wins before people wake up.

This momentum stays with you throughout the day, and you accomplish much more in your days.

Most people don’t get much done because they trained themselves to procrastinate.

They’re reactive in the morning.

You’ll win the rest of the day if you get the morning right.

Eat your biggest, ugliest frog within a few minutes of waking.

This is how you reach peak productivity and stay in a flow state.

2. Overconsuming

“Everlasting pain is often caused by the pursuit of fleeting pleasure.”

— Mokokoma Mokhonoa

We live in a time where it’s super easy to overconsume.

When my parents were kids, they had to read books to figure stuff out.

For them, overconsuming meant spending their entire day reading or making countless trips to the store to buy food.

This just wasn’t practical.

Nowadays, all you have to do is press a few buttons.

For example, if I want to know what Kim Kardashian is up to, I can just log into Instagram. If I want to find a date for the weekend, I can just swipe right a couple of times.

That’s not to say access and advancement are a bad thing… It’s not.

The problem starts with what you’re consuming.

Most of the things people consume are junk.

When you’re constantly consuming garbage, you’re training your brain to have low standards for yourself.

The worst part is most people consume way too much and still feel like they need more.

According to Benjamin Hardy, this is “the mental equivalent of an obese person who thinks they’re hungry all the time.”

Most people already know what they need to do to make progress on their goals, but they’d rather seek more stimulation and consumption because they don’t feel like they’ve had enough.

They’re mentally obese.

I like how Benjamin Hardy put it – he said:

“Most people don’t have a healthy information diet. Most people are after the low-hanging fruit, the “fast food” of information — easy to access and just as easily destructive to your mental focus. High-consumption, high-artificial information diets produce mediocre brain capacity at best.”

When you consume low-quality information, your worldview becomes low-quality.

As Zig Ziglar once said, “Your input determines your outlook. Your outlook determines your output, and your output determines your future.”

If you’re consuming crap, your outlook on the future will be crap.

Your standards will be low level.

All of this stuff is teaching your brain how to function.

It can only make do with what it’s given.

To program it to function in your favor, you must eliminate all the junk.

Consume less but better information.

Follow Pareto’s principle. 80/20.

20% of what you do produces 80% of your results.

… So focus on that 20%

Strip away 80% of what you consume. You don’t need it.

Benjamin Hardy said, “Part of training your brain to become effective, phenomenal, and powerful, is to have clear filters and standards for what you say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to.”

Seek quality instead of quantity.

Whatever you let in signals to your brain that it’s important; thus, your brain will allow it to evade its filter.

You know a person by what they’re committed to.

What you regularly say “Yes” to defines you.

This includes your weight, income, relationships, and more.

What you have now is the product of what you were committed to in the past.

To have a better future, you must commit to a brighter future.

Consume less, but better.

This will teach your brain to filter out things that don’t move you toward where you want to go.

You’ll also raise your standard and make your actions more effective, getting you where you want to go faster.

3. Trying to juggle too much

“If you have more than three priorities, then you don’t have any.”

— Jim Collins

There’s only so much you can get done in a given day.

Once you exceed this limit, you’ll wander into a realm of undirected busy work.

This is because every time you switch tasks, your brain has to pay a penalty for the transition since it takes time to “download” the next task into context in your working memory.

Not only does this shatter your focus and tip you out of flow, but you also waste energy in the process.

You’re not able to go deep.

Psychologists call this phenomenon task switching.

You must train your brain to focus deeply on one task for 3–4 hours to achieve big things.

When you commit to doing one thing at a time, your brain doesn’t waste energy switching tasks.

You remain in flow.

This is why I only do research when I’m researching for my Medium stories. I don’t task switch. I write when it’s time to write and edit when it’s time to edit.

You’ve got to train your brain to focus on one thing at a time.

When you’re doing a bunch of stuff throughout the day, you prevent your brain from going deep in the few things that truly matter.

You’re literally obstructing your path to greatness.

As a rule of thumb, you should never have more than 3 priorities in a day.

Once you exceed this number, you’re trespassing in unproductive territory.

4. Setting goals based on where you are or not setting them at all

“If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy and inspires your hopes.”

— Andrew Carnegie

Most people fall into one of two categories:

They don’t have a clearly defined goal

They have a clearly defined goal but only an incremental gain.

Both of these are bad for your brain

Like the Chesire Cat said in Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s tale, Alice in Wonderland, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”

Put another way:

If you don’t have a clearly defined goal, your strategy can be anything, and you’ll still succeed at reaching your non-goal.

The other problem is a clearly defined goal that only incrementally builds on where you are.

For example, surviving to the end of the month when you get your paycheck or getting to the end of the week to have two days off.

Their future is short-sighted and not compelling enough to transform them into a bigger, better version of themself.

Dan Sullivan refers to this as a 2x vision.

It’s when you extrapolate your current situation to continue your future.

You might say, “Since I’m a junior engineer, my goal is to become a senior engineer.”

You’re just continuing a trend. You’re taking a linear path.

This is mentally destructive because it enables you to retain most of your current life. It’s here where overconsumption begins.

According to Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan, the authors of 10x Is Easier Than 2x, going after 10x is the way to live the happiest and most fulfilling life.

10x is when you define and commit to a seemingly impossible goal.

Most people don’t do it because it means letting go of 80% of their current life, which is usually their security blanket.

Jim Rohn gave us a glimpse of what it means to go 10x when he said, “Set a goal to become a millionaire for what it makes of you to achieve it. Do it for the skills you have to learn and the person you have to become.”

He understood that big goals are the root of personal transformation.

2x goals often tend to stem from a place of need.

You NEED to get married.

You NEED a promotion.

You NEED to survive to the end of the month.

The issue with such goals is once they’re achieved, your brain will find something else to NEED because it was never taught how to create a vision for what you WANT.

If you want to level up your brain, you must have a seemingly impossible future self you’re trying to manifest.

This forces your brain to operate at a higher level.

You’ll naturally begin to attract the right people, resources, and opportunities into your life to advance you toward your desired outcome.

5. Going through life at 100mph

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

— Socrates

Just because you’re moving fast doesn’t mean you’re going somewhere.

You must take time to reflect on your goals and how your current actions are helping you achieve them.

Most people don’t do this, which is why most people don’t become world-class.

Reflection is a vital component of deep work and deliberate practice.

What progress have you made in the past week?

If you don’t know, how do you get better?

You must take time to observe, track, and report everything that moves you closer to your goals.

Seeing this progress gives your brain a shot of motivation.

You’ll instantly be motivated to make more progress.

As Pearson’s law states:

“That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially.”

Give your brain a chance to feel good for all the hard work it’s putting in.

Take time to reflect and celebrate what you’re doing well.

Not only does it make your brain feel good, but it also gives you the power to transform the meaning of your past.

When you address a past memory, you get to define what it means and how it makes you better.

This is what I had to do when I left the cult…

I sat down with a trusted person and shared all of my memories.

He didn’t judge, nor did he add any input. He just listened.

The more I spoke about my experience, the more I realized I had the agency to label it as something positive.

In psychology, this is known as post-traumatic growth.

It’s when you experience positive psychological change as a result of struggling with highly challenging, highly stressful life circumstances.

Anyone can experience post-traumatic growth.

The secret is to define how you see your past.

You can’t define your past if you don’t take time to reflect.

Just slow down.

You don’t need to go so fast.

Focus on making meaningful progress.

Stop and look at where you are, where you’ve come from, and where you’re going.

Are you on course?

The more you do this, the more you train your brain to seek opportunities that will bring you closer to your desired end.

Read also: 10 things you should always keep to yourself according to psychology 

Final thoughts

The effectiveness of your brain depends on your conditioning.

If you teach it to perform poorly with toxic habits, it will do as it’s told.

It will also follow instructions if you train it to perform at peak levels.

You have the ability to achieve what may seem absurd to you right now, but it all depends on how you train your brain.

The truth is it wants to help you.

It wants to filter for what’s most important to you.

It wants to find hidden treasures.

It wants to develop unique skills, abilities, and connections.

The only catch is you must be the one to program it to produce the results you’re most committed to.

Thanks for reading!

🎈GET THIS NOW: AUTOMATED INCOME MACHINE

Contributed by Kurtis Pykes

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