Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) - For Productivity and Performance

so I set up this channel because I find things like self-improvement, bodybuilding, brain training, all this super interesting and there wasn't much content like this on YouTube or the web in general, so I thought I would share it with guys and I hope you find it interesting, but what I really love is when some people message me and tell me that something I've said has really helped them, which I wasn't expecting hugely, to be honest, because most of my training videos. like Spider-Man or becoming Batman. I just enjoyed a comment someone left on my being like Batman video where they said, thank you very much, now I'm Batman.

Anyway, I really love it when something I share helped someone, so in this video. I'm going to share the technique or knowledge that I think has been most helpful to me personally and to many people I know. It's called CBT and in many ways it's the best type of brain training I know. become unlimited without the pill, so I studied psychology in college and that's where I learned about all this stuff, that's why I always talk about neuroscience and the type of nervous system in relation to training; That is my area of ​​interest. CBT was one of the concepts that most attracted me and that made a lot of intuitive sense.

This is a psychotherapeutic technique, which means that it is a form of

therapy

similar to psychoanalysis or

behavioral

therapy

that is used to treat a variety of psychological disorders such as phobias, anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder and means

cognitive

-

behavioral

therapy that It will make sense in a moment when we get to it. It is a kind of combination between

cognitive

psychology and behavioral therapy, which is why CBT is typically used to address psychological problems. However, I think it can be much more than that. I think it can be used to improve your

productivity

. Your concentration. How to get into a flow state to help you be more positive.

To help you sleep better. It is excellent for overcoming insomnia and helping you achieve more. strength in the gym, more mind-muscle connection, all of these things and I think it's actually really untapped in terms of its potential and I talked a little bit about some of my ideas in that regard towards the end, but we look at it in context to treat a mental illness because it is the easiest way to understand it, so let's say you have a phobia of heights, you go to see a psychoanalyst, this is an old school psychologist, they will tell you that it could be due to something from your childhood , a repressed feeling or emotion something you have forgotten maybe the way your parents raised you they will talk to you go and very in depth they will give you ink blot tests they will analyze your dreams and try to delve into the roots of your unconscious problems that are falling a bit out of favor, although some people still use it and it still has its merits, so you could go to a behavioral therapist if that doesn't work and they would basically train you not to be afraid of those Heights by just going to Heights that gradually increase. and more and making the experience less horrible by associating it with pleasant things, maybe eating sweets, maybe thinking happy thoughts and this would eventually stop you from being afraid of heights, but it's about training, it's about interacting with the world, whereas CBT says that it is not just the experiences that cause the phobia, but the way you think about them, so it will try to change the way you think about heights, so let's say you have a fear of heights, which that could be causing that fear, well, a behavior.

The therapist would say that you once experienced height in negative circumstances, you were very afraid and this caused an association between that height and fear or maybe you saw someone fall from a height or maybe you were very high in a negative situation. Likewise, in context, the psychoanalyst would say that you had a bad childhood experience that you repressed, like I said, but the cognitive behavioral therapist would point out that some people are afraid of heights and have never been up high, so how does this happen? It's all here because you can rehearse that situation in your mind, you can think about being on top even when you're not on top and that can make you scare me, it creates the association, you can connect those neurons together if you've seen my In a video about the neuroplasticity of neurons, you can connect those new arms without even having to experience it, because when we imagine doing something to our brain, it is no different from actually doing it.

Similar brain areas activate as if you were participating in the action in order to create. an experience vivid enough in your mind that you are afraid of heights and more than that you reaffirm that fear by going up high and then thinking bad things if you go up high, say that you are going to see a view on a mountain if you are someone who has afraid of heights, you might find yourself thinking, damn, what if I jump or what if I fall if I slip? Or you may imagine yourself falling to the ground and all of these things scare you much more than if you did.

Don't think about those things if you thought about more positive things like most people don't fall or I'm standing far from the edge or who has ever tripped that far, you know we wouldn't be allowed up here if we did. insecure all that if I died I wouldn't know anything about it it wouldn't even be that bad so you need to replace those negative thoughts and associations with positive ones by changing your way of thinking and as I say this can affect many. different areas of your life, not just Heights, so for example, if you're someone who has difficulty socially speaking confidently to people, then you might think, hey, if I speak now in this group, they'll laugh at me, they'll think the same as me.

He said it was stupid, so they won't take me seriously. It's better not to do it and you start to have that physiological response like if you're already speaking in public, you're shaking, you're nervous. you're sweating and you haven't had anything to drink and these are all your friends who don't care and if they TZ it's only because they love you so you need to replace those negative thoughts and this could give you a lot more confidence. Start seeing you improving your experience in life twice in my life. Changing the way I think about things has helped me and I'll talk about that in a moment, so now you know the problem, what techniques does cognitive behavioral therapy recommend you use in order?

To address the problem, he recommends using something called cognitive restructuring, which is as cool as it sounds. You are basically reprogramming your own mind. The first part of this is mindfulness, it's being more aware of your own thoughts. You can do this through mindful meditation. it means you're meditating but not trying to block out thoughts, you're just trying to reflect on thoughts and you can do that through journaling, just journaling, you can do that just by being more aware of what you're doing at all times. The day and mindfulness itself have so many benefits because we do all kinds of things on autopilot, thinking and acting in ways we aren't aware of.

Here's a little experiment to help you see how much you get done without thinking about it. Try counting the number of times you sit down and get up from a chair today or tomorrow. It sounds very simple. I bet you'll forget to do it after the second time. You will do it once. You will do it later. In this case, you may not even do it that time and then you will forget about it. That's how unconscious we are, we also get distracted by other things, so be careful, observe your thoughts, write them down if it helps you and realize, think about why I'm afraid. of heights I'm afraid of speaking in public I procrastinate I can't sleep write these things down what's really going through your mind often if you're really sad you might find that you can even get to the bottom of it I really have the devil at a bad time.

I felt really miserable because I was supposed to see my family. I couldn't and I felt miserable all day and I thought: why am I miserable? Who is helping? And I realized that deep down. I felt miserable because I felt like I deserved sympathy and if I acted miserably people would be nice to me, except my wife was already being nice to me, there's no one else in the house so it's kind of a natural reaction and when I realized It was like what doesn't benefit me and I'll see them later. I can call them on the phone and I could be a lot happier, so just being aware of your own thoughts can help a lot, but then there's.

We are going to try to change those thoughts with cognitive restructuring. One way to do this is with something called a thought challenge. Thought challenging means that you simply look at what is troubling you or holding you back and then you challenge it and say how. This is probably going to be a problem, so let's say you're worried about public speaking if you're giving a speech and you've assessed what you're worried about, you're worried about people laughing. If you say something wrong or if you stutter, we will now use a mental challenge to evaluate how realistic that worry is and this is reality.

Most people won't laugh at you if you stutter on stage. Most people are much more compassionate. So if you laugh at something because you're having a bad time on stage, you're an idiot. We've all been there at the same time. Does it really matter? No, you don't know these people, you won't see them again. You'll probably stutter if you want to and as soon as you relax and stop worrying about stuttering then you won't stutter anymore anyway, so you have to help yourself accept that fear and realize that it's not that bad, anyway. The same way you can use this to overcome fears of achieving certain goals Tim Ferriss in the book The 4 Hour Work Week talks about fear setting which basically means that you concretize your fears and worries, things prevent me from taking risks. in life, so say you want to start your own business, but you keep putting it off, write down the reasons why you're not afraid and then evaluate each one of them on how realistic it is and look at plans for how it would be better to get those things if they came out Badly they say, for example, I would quit my job, I wouldn't have any money, I would end up on the street and my wife would leave me.

Well, how about this? Don't quit your job until you have a job? business model so you know it works and then you transition, maybe work part time first, so that won't really be a problem. You probably have enough savings to last about two months. You probably aren't completely unable to find more work. If this goes wrong, you probably have parents who helped you and who you could live with. Your wife probably won't leave you to pursue your dreams. If so, then you know that you may need to rethink your relationship again many times. the fears that hold us back and are not so realistic and by evaluating them, making them concrete and realizing that we can overcome them and then the other form of cognitive restructuring that you can use is hypothesis testing and this is what you are going to do It's not about Just by thinking about what's holding you back, you're actually going to go out and try to do it and see that you're wrong.

For example, if you are worried about public speaking because you think you are going to do things, people will laugh at you, you are going to speak in public and you stutter on purpose, you leave long spaces between what you say on purpose and you just wait and people will wait. with you because they are understanding and once you've done it a couple of times and realized it's not that bad, then you can relax. By evaluating your thoughts, writing down what's holding you back, and testing them, you can overcome all kinds of negative ideas and at the same time think that it's a good idea to include visualization in this somehow because, like I said before, when you visualize something, your brain essentially thinks you're doing that, you shine light on the same areas of the brain and as we know, neurons that fire together wire together.

If you keep imagining that you are falling off something, and of course you create the association that heights are dangerous, but if you vividly imagine that you are standing far from the edge of a cliff or mountain, then you can relax more and start to eliminate that negative association. watch my video on embodied cognition to understand the extent to which visualization can play a role in the way we think; in fact, it explains how we understand our language, even for me embodied cognition is the missing link between behaviorism and cognitive behavioral therapy because it explains how by simply thinking something we can create new associations just as we were actually practicing them.

Really all of this also shows how much of your physiological reaction and emotions are impacted by your thoughts and not just what is actually happening. Depending on your visualization, an example you like to use for this is that you are camping with your friends and you hear a rustling in the bush, you are in the African savannah, so you suspect it could be a lion, a tiger, a snake, something dangerous. what's going to happen your heart rate will increase you're going to start sweating you're going to get cold you're going to feel nervous and you're going to have that reaction as if something terriblewas happening even before it happened you are ready for anything but at the same time you are anxious Nervous, you are struggling to concentrate, but if you later found out that it was just a kitten or that it was your friend laughing, then you would instantly relax because now you know that you are not in danger, so it wasn't. the fact that there was a tiger it wasn't reality that made you have that reaction it was your interpretation it was your internal experience and this is what we imagine lions around us all the time we imagine things are worse than they are all the time time you think your boss is going to fire you because you're late no, it's not illegal for him to do that you think your partner is going to leave you because you forgot to send a text no, she's not chill, she's cool or he's cool.

We exaggerate these things, we make things worse in our heads and that makes us less productive, it makes us less focused and less happy, it makes us less efficient in general, so being more aware of our thoughts and learning to control them and change those negative ones can help a lot. CBT also involves learning a lot of different tools and skills, like breathing techniques, things like meditation, that you can use to address physiological signs and thoughts when you notice them, for example, if you notice them. your heart rate increases CBT therapist a cognitive behavioral therapist will teach you how to breathe to calm yourself and lower your heart rate we have talked about techniques you can use things like box breathing to do this they will also use things like biofeedback which means observing how the Your partner's heart rate increases in certain circumstances and decreases in others.

I'm pointing to my wrist because you could use a fitness track to do this, for example, and then you'll learn more about how to control your heart rate. own physiological physiology and of course this is very interesting for any biohacker, it's something we already do, it just makes sense to do it in this context, so I said I'll talk about how CBT helped me personally and maybe this will help help you too and see how it could improve your own life, so an example is when I was younger I had a sort of strange thing where I struggled with the ping in men's urinals, a bit embarrassing, apparently I'm sharing now the reason why I was afraid that when I applied a little mindfulness, I thought that if I couldn't, I would just stand there and then people would look at me like why is there a guy in the bathroom doing nothing. and they would think I'm a weird pervert, so every time I go pee in a pub or something, this would be my worry, if people see me standing there, they'll think I'm a pervert and I won't do it.

I couldn't quit weed because I was so nervous, so I couldn't because I was so nervous, so I always ended up peeing in the stalls, which obviously meant standing in line, which obviously wasn't very convenient, it was strange and I realized that this was not like that. It wasn't healthy, I needed to get over it, so I ended up realizing that no one is going to think that because most people aren't going to be there long enough and if they are, they're in the same condition as me and they're not in a position. to think that and they're probably all drunk if I'm in the pub so they won't even notice.

Look, I don't care if they think I'm weird, perfect, then it's fine, as long as you don't call the police, then I'm happy that a stranger thinks I'm checking his license plate, so I remembered this. I would think it was the ones in the bathroom, doesn't matter, just great and then at the same time, practice staying there for longer hypothesis tests to make sure it really wasn't that bad, nothing bad became a bit of course which wasn't the case, and today you have no problem being in public urinals, a victory for Adam, another example of when.

It helped me when I had trouble falling asleep and in the end my mother pointed out to me that the problem could be that I was trying too hard to fall asleep and that the solution was to simply not try to sleep, but try and rest because even when you are lying down you are still resting and it may not be as good as sleeping, but it still gives you some kind of recovery and that's good enough and as soon as I did it, as soon as I took the pressure. After sleeping I was able to sleep because I was stressed about not being in the game and not being able to sleep and that increased my heart rate, put me in a physiologically excited state of mind.

I was looking at the alarm clock that said 4 a.m. and I got stressed because I was at school the next day, but then I thought I was just lying here, I just relaxed and that's okay and I really enjoyed relaxing and as soon as I started to enjoy just lying there, I let the thoughts wash over me and they stopped. I was worried about how to fall asleep and I fell asleep like a light and I still keep coming back to this day, so again that was one way that CBT could be used to treat insomnia and CBT is very effective in treating insomnia in general.

I still have a sticker phobia and I'm sure there is a CBT way to overcome that, but I haven't tried it yet, it's not so much a failure. I just find them very disgusting. I don't like looking at them, I find them repulsive. I learned a lot about myself today, yes, and I see that it can also be used in all kinds of ways to improve your

performance

, your efficiency or

productivity

, so in a productivity environment, if you keep procrastinating, you can use a little attention full to try to find out why. you're procrastinating and you know, find ways to give yourself whatever it is you're looking for, maybe you're tired, this is just being more aware of your body, maybe it's what you're doing, you find it boring and you need to do it.

Find ways to make it more interesting, just as you can make things less important, you can also make them more important by associating them with the goal at the end of the line. For example, if you work on a really boring project, visualize and imagine the adulation you will receive from your client from your boss when you complete that project and visualize that you meet your future successful self, who has a great career because you worked hard today. and you feel like that. People use CBT to overcome eating disorders. and also to help with diets, being more aware of your thoughts can also help you be more focused, calmer and collected when you are in a fight, when you practice martial arts, it can help you focus more on your workouts.

At the gym and I've talked about flow states and a lot of what we discussed there was about changing your mindset and changing your physiological response to situations so that you're excited but not anxious, so that you're alert but not wired and look. if you can also make yourself more sociable, more confident, more effective in networking and entrepreneurial, so that you become more like Eddie Mora in NZT because you are not, because you are charismatic, charming and relaxed, instead of anxious and nervous , can help you work towards your goals like in the Big Easy like in Tim Ferriss' setting fear example.

I have a friend at the moment who is studying a coaching course to help people achieve their dreams and goals and it revolves around CBT, so that's CBT in a nutshell. Of course, there is much more to it than that and I will talk about it again in the future, but this was just a brief overview of some ideas and I hope it can help you in some aspects of your own life and of course if you come across any. If this is useful and you have a serious problem, I recommend that you go see a cognitive behavioral therapist and they will help you with all this and teach you how to use it correctly.

If you liked the video, leave a like, share it. that helps me tremendously, subscribe to the channel for more like this, hit the bell button for notifications and stay tuned because I have tons more on the way. I will talk about how to get your dream job online, how to train like a mi6 special agent how to accelerate learning and learn more topics all kinds of things bodybuilding calisthenics if that all sounds good then stay tuned thank you very much for watching and I will see you around next time bye for now guys I have an idea for a future bio near the video and it will be on home bat caves so bat cave in this definition is a home gym or a home office which is really cool and makes you feel productive and helps you workout, maybe you have some cool workout gear in there. some unique ideas maybe you have a really inspiring home office design.

I'm going to share my home office and my gym which I call a biological laboratory partly because I'm forced to move to a different room, so you I'll get rid of this one, it would be nice to memorize it on film, but I want to see yours too, so if you go to the Facebook page and share a link or a photo of your house. gym or your productivity space, we combine both and all the best ones, with your permission, I will share them in that video and we can see all our bat caves and come up with cool ideas for workspaces and productive home gyms, and yes, nerd .

Like, so if that sounds good, head over to the Facebook page, the link will be in the description, scroll down until you find the topic. I'll post about it and it'll be there. Say again, thanks Don for watching and goodbye for now.