This is for those times where life starts to lose its wonder and zest.
When you feel more tired than you do calm.
When you may not realize you're using coffee as a security blanket.
When you start to notice dark circles under your eyes.
When you look back to a time where life felt seamless and almost magical.
Because there's a harsh reality of living in today's world.
By simply living, we take on risk, but not the good type of risk.
The risk of binge tech like social media, streaming, gaming, and news.
The risk of simulated sexual stimulation like pornography and dating apps.
The risk of consumables, like alcohol, drugs, and junk food.
The risk of thrill-seeking, like gambling, shopping sprees, or extreme sports.
Now, I'm not one to demonize your actions here.
I'm not a saint by any means.
I'm just a guy who studies weird stuff and shares what he learns on the internet.
For money, sure, but also meaning.
Because if I wanted to get filthy rich, I'd start a religion.
Most people online love to put on this guise of perfection.
They'll be the first to tell you when you're doing something that's just slightly bad.
But when you look at their life, they're usually not in the physical mental, spiritual or financial situation that you would ever want to be in, And that's the thing.
You've done what someone else thinks is bad at least 5 to 10 to 100 times this week.
And so have the people that think what you're doing is bad.
And that's fine.
But we're not here to discuss morality behind all of this.
Instead, I want to talk about this.
When you live in today's world of convenient, quick pleasures, and if you don't want to become a monk because if you did want that, it's out of ego, which I find funny, then you need a tool to perform a factory reset on your life.
Meaning in this world of technology.
You need some kind of tool to mitigate the problems that technology causes.
If you're not going to go and live off in the woods, then you need to implement something into your life that helps mitigate the risk of using your phone, using the internet, being around, cheap and convenient foods, etc.
So if you do what we're going to talk about at least once a year for 30 days at a time, you will buffer the consequences of modern life.
In other words, you will bring that childlike wonder back into your life.
That feeling of not caring, that feeling of non narrow mindedness, of open mindedness, of not being stuck in your head all day and actually being able to experience life on a deeper level.
So before we talk about the actual dopamine detox protocol, let's talk about the brain.
Let's talk about what's going on. why this cheap dopamine epidemic is such a problem.
And I also want to note that Superhuman 90, which is a protocol to reset your life in 90 days instead of 30, like we're talking about in this video, with training, nutrition and lifestyle systems, that goes live on October 28th and the price increases then.
So if you want to check it out, Link in the description.
Your brain operates on a salience network, meaning whatever provides the most dopamine becomes the most important.
I think you can already see how big of a problem that can become.
But let's have some fun and let's break it down.
As we've discussed way too many times, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the godfather of flow, the flow psychologist.
He found that flow states, or the optimal state of human experience, or just pure enjoyment, require a specific skill to challenge ratio.
If the challenge of a goal is too high for your skill level, you get anxious.
If the challenge is too low, you get bored.
You wouldn't fight a level 100 character when you are a level 1.
It just doesn't make sense.
Overstimulation destroys the potential for flow states or enjoyment because it raises the bar for what you consider stimulating.
Everything that is more boring than your phone gambling porn, partying and the rest is automatically labeled as boring by your brain.
So a dopamine detox has become a well marketed way of resetting your baseline for stimulation.
And it works so well for three reasons.
The first is that boredom is the gateway to novelty.
Carl Jung, OG psychologist, harped on the importance of shadow work or confronting the uncomfortable aspects of ourselves we typically avoid.
Sitting with boredom does just this.
It activates breakthrough insights when the rational mind stops trying to solve everything.
It reveals our authentic desires beneath external conditioning.
It sets the scene for three flow triggers making you more likely to enter a season of intense learning and building.
The first trigger is deep embodiment, so being present with discomfort.
The second is novelty, because boredom forces you to seek new, healthier stimulation.
And the third is unpredictability, not knowing what will emerge from the void.
You're bored because you don't have a quest.
You don't have a quest because you're playing someone else's game.
And counterintuitively.
The solution is to stop playing any game and sit with your boredom until your own becomes clear.
Now, the second reason that dopamine detoxes work so well is that the brain will upregulate dopamine receptors when deprived, because hedonic adaptation is your psychological thermostat.
No matter how high or low the temperature goes, it always tries to return to the set point.
This creates what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill.
You're always running toward the next source of pleasure, but the satisfaction never lasts.
Each experience becomes your new normal, requiring more intense stimulation to achieve the same emotional high.
But when you deprive yourself of pleasure, the opposite happens.
It's a hedonic treadmill reversal.
Slowly, then rapidly, simple pleasures become enjoyable again.
You experience what the Buddhists call beginner's mind.
You notice the detail in the sky when you walk outside.
You notice the hint of rosemary in a well-cooked meal.
Life becomes electric, as it should be.
Now, the third reason a dopamine detox works is that you don't need motivation, you need clarity.
Now, Naval said all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
So think about that.
When was the last time that you actually created space for emergence?
Because that's how reality works.
Through chaos or a change in perspective of chaos, order emerges.
And when I hear that, I can't help but think about this image.
A dopamine detox creates space for sense-making, that is, processing and integrating experience.
In the information age, modern technology creates a context collapse.
Our brain is only capable of processing so much information around 50 bits of information per second through our conscious attention.
So if you were to binge on food over the course of a month, you would probably gain a good amount of fat.
Now if you were to binge on information from social media as an example, Every day, since you've had the app installed on your phone, you're walking around mentally obese.
And you don't notice it because it's become normal.
It's homeostasis.
Now, when you deprive yourself to the point of boredom, you're almost forced to confront all of the problems that you've suppressed over the years.
Now.
It will be painful, but if you sit with it long enough, you'll receive a burst of clarity that launches you into a new phase of life.
So now we can talk about the actual dopamine detox protocol.
What are we going to do for the next 30 days?
Now, the ultimate goal isn't to become an ascetic or a monk or go off and live in the woods and never experience modern pleasures again.
The goal is to develop sovereignty and agency the capacity to choose consciously rather than to react compulsively.
The capacity to notice where your life is heading, generate new goals that align with the future you want, and act toward those goals without permission from anyone else.
A periodic detox is a calibration tool to keep you on track every 6 to 12 months.
And this creates the foundation from what our Lord and Savior, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, considers the highest human aspiration.
A life composed of flow, states where challenge and skill dance in perfect harmony, creating meaning through engaged attention and action.
With all of that said, here's the protocol.
Step one is the pain and gain story.
Because before we continue, there's a problem.
You've watched this far.
You like what you're hearing.
You're motivated to change your life.
But we all know that unless you set the stage for an identity shift because all lasting behavior change is identity change you will give up in two weeks, like always.
So you need to create a visceral, emotional and specific story, two stories to be exact one for where your life will end up if you keep living in pain and one for who you will become if you decide to change Now.
For things like this, I love using AI.
I don't like having AI tell me what my pain story is or my gain story is, because it needs my personal context.
That's when I like using AI.
So when I have to amply give it my personal context and it can string things together and show me things that I didn't know before.
And it can just be difficult to dig into your own head and find out what these things are.
Usually it comes through a few months of just going about life and having conversations and noticing little things here and there that you pick up and you realize, oh yeah, I don't want that.
I do want that.
Now I have a piece of this story.
But you can get that faster by conversing with AI in the correct way.
So I created this extremely extensive AI prompt to ask you questions and to help determine what your pain and gain story is.
And this is the foundation for having the motivation to actually change.
Now, a disclaimer here is that I program this to be pretty intense.
I told it not to hold back.
It digs deep and it tries to get to the root of your motivation.
Now, this is just one prompt that I'm giving away for free, but there are four more in Superhuman 90, the complete life reset in 90 days that I talked about before.
Link in the description if you want more of that now.
Step two in the protocol is to go monk mode, because if you've never done this before, it'll be difficult and if you don't have a deep intrinsic reason to see it through, you will probably give up very quick.
That's why step one is so important.
Now, for 30 days, you're eliminating binge tech, social media, streaming gaming news, unnatural sexual stimulation, porn and dating apps consumables alcohol drugs, junk food, sweetness in general and thrill-seeking.
So gambling, shopping sprees, extreme sports.
Now if you're asking, what will I do with my time then?
That's the exact problem.
What do you mean what do you do with your time?
You do what non-addicted people do.
You move, you exercise, you talk to people, you prepare your food, you learn and build toward your goals.
And when you aren't doing those things, you sit with the boredom until it's no longer boring.
Now getting into things that you can actually implement in your lifestyle.
Step three is to walk 10000 steps a day.
Sounds simple, but hear me out.
Now the funny thing here is that 10000 steps a day was actually a marketing gimmick to help sell pedometers.
The sweet spot for walking is actually 7000 to 8000 steps.
That's where most of the benefits are received.
10,000 steps just sounds nicer.
Now, why go on more?
For most untrained people, it's a form of low-intensity cardio.
It improves digestion, blood pressure, and insulin sensitivity, helping you to get and stay lean.
You finally get some sunlight to unfuck your circadian health.
It's an undistracted time to learn something new, so listen to an audiobook or lecture.
You can resolve mental turmoil and reflect on your life, and you can generate ideas that can be put to use in your deep work sessions.
Now, specifically here, I'd recommend the three by 20 method.
That's what i'm calling it and what.
It is super simple.
You walk three times a day, 20 minutes after each major meal breakfast lunch, dinner because one 20 minutes is more than doable.
Two if you do that three times a day, you get all the benefits.
That is probably going to equal seven to eight thousand steps and you'll probably hit ten thousand if you walk at any other time during the day.
Because the thing here is, if you do it morning afternoon night, you get morning sunlight, afternoon sunlight, evening sunlight, which will drastically increase your sleep quality.
You'll be dropping water, weight and inflammation if you've never done this before, and you're going to notice a decently drastic change in how you look and feel within the first seven days.
And this is considering you live the average American lifestyle.
And this is in the context of the entire dopamine detox protocol.
The 10,000 steps is to just get you moving.
Now, the fourth one building on top of that is to go to the gym.
Seriously.
Because when I look and feel terrible, I don't want to do anything with my life.
I want to hide from the world.
I don't feel confident in my actions.
So I stop caring even more.
I let myself go.
I binge eat.
I have zero discipline and simply feel worse.
Now, I personally believe that every single person should do some form of resistance training.
Cardio is great, but so is a bit of muscle mass.
In my own life, I like going to the gym and I like walking.
Sometimes I do do cardio in the morning and I've actually been doing more of that just 20 minutes first thing when I wake up.
But the other thing here is that, frankly, nobody wants to look like a runner.
And I'm talking about runners who only run and don't lift or didn't build their physique by lifting and then start running.
And people think that they got their physique from running.
That's not how it happens.
And it's okay to not lie to yourself.
Men, you want broad shoulders and a V taper.
Women, you want the hourglass figure.
It's a survival mechanism and you will only create that physique in the gym or through some form of resistance training.
You can do calisthenics, you can do at-home workouts, but the most optimal way, and arguably the most enjoyable way, is to just go to the gym.
And no, ladies, you will never get too bulky.
Men have been trying to do that their entire lives and they still can't do it.
Now beyond that, 30 plus minutes of exercise provides steady and sustainable dopamine release.
Physical movement is one of the most reliable flow triggers.
It creates BDNF, or brain-derived neurotrophic factor, supporting neuroplasticity.
Strength training lowers the risk of heart disease diabetes, cancer and early death.
Plus, muscle protects against frailty as you get older.
More muscle equals higher bmr, equals you can eat more without gaining fat, and it boosts mitochondrial density and efficiency, which equals more energy.
And i don't want to hear the regurgitated.
Lifting weights is risky and can get you injured, because the answer is yes if you're stupid or don't know what you're doing.
So first learn about it.
To go to the gym.
Three, if you want my training or also my trainer's training that he's given me, because Superhuman 90 was created by both of us.
Check that out.
Now, step five is to do an elimination diet because I love health and fitness.
It's been a passion of mine for 15 years now, since I was 15.
I just turned 29 yesterday.
And yes, when I was 15, I was obsessively tracking calories and macros.
I've tried every diet under the sun.
But since I've tried every diet under the sun, I understand that they're all based on a few principles and I try to be non-dogmatic about all of them.
With that said, I do think that everyone should do an elimination diet at least once in their life.
Why?
Because it nearly guarantees a drastic boost in energy.
Two, you'll also lower inflammation and drop water weight, making you look 10 pounds lighter with a tighter jawline.
If you actually commit to it for 30 plus days, you will rewire your eating habits and potentially become disgusted at the thought of eating hyperpalatable foods again.
And you may find foods that create digestive problems, skin problems headaches, or foods that just make you feel terrible without you noticing.
So to make this simple and not have this video drag on, just try the vertical diet.
It's by Stan Efferding.
Many bodybuilders swear by it.
Many other people swear by it.
But here's an image.
It's pretty simple.
Red meat, very nutrient dense.
White rice, easy to digest.
And micronutrients from various other things.
Literally just follow this graph.
But this is the diet that I kind of return to when I need to go back to a baseline, when I find myself going out too much or going to Chipotle after the gym and starting to feel worse or look puffier in the face in the morning.
But yeah, try it out.
Now, step six is to build a new project that increases your potential.
Now listen to this carefully.
The best way to learn is to build a real world project and only search for information when you need it.
How much you learn is directly correlated with how much progress you make on the project.
When you watch endless tutorials, you fill your mind with noise and chaos.
Most of that information goes to waste.
It leads to overwhelm, anxiety and slows down how fast you learn.
Now, when it comes time to build the project because the only reason you're learning in the first place is to build the project you feel as if you learn nothing and you have to search for the information anyway.
So if you want to learn faster, skip the tutorial phase. outline a project first.
Now, this confuses a lot of people.
What do you mean by a project?
A project is anything.
Your health can be a project.
Your business can be a project.
A thing in Photoshop can be a project.
A project is simply a structured way of achieving a goal or making progress toward a goal.
It's a way to further narrow your frame of reference, so your mind biases the right information as you learn.
As you read books, study tutorials or have conversations, good dopamine will spurt into your brain to signal that information is important for the completion of the project.
Your subconscious will munch on problems and send relevant ideas to your conscious mind.
This is what creatives call shower thoughts.
It's when the default mode network in your brain is active when you are at rest.
Charles Darwin worked on his projects and focused blocks, then went on long walks, and on these walks his brain was at rest and potential solutions to problems pop into his head.
Now here's how you start a project.
Choose something to build that moves the needle toward what you want in life.
Now from earlier, this is your pain and gain story.
Create a note or document and brain dump everything that comes to mind.
Save three to five sources of inspiration that you want to emulate.
If I'm creating a YouTube video as a project, I would save three to five YouTube videos.
Study those sources and break down their structure or characteristics.
Outline the project into sections, milestones, images, inspiration, and what you need to know.
And last, have a place to capture ideas that come to mind.
Preferably somewhere you don't lose the ideas or forget about them.
So now that you're ready to start, don't start learning.
Just start the project.
Now step seven, and arguably the most important one.
That nobody does is to reflect for 10 minutes every night.
Because your brain is constantly trying to process your experiences and when you don't give it dedicated time, it hijacks your attention at the worst possible moments.
This is the Zeigarnik effect.
Your brain holds onto incomplete tasks and unprocessed experiences, creating tension that drains your cognitive resources.
So reflection helps close open loops for the day.
Among other things like it is an active metacognition, or thinking about your thinking, the highest form of human intelligence.
It builds a feedback loop for progress and after 30 days, you'll have 30 data points about what actually moves your life forward.
It transforms mistakes into data rather than regrets, and it reduces decision fatigue for tomorrow.
So set a non-negotiable alarm for 930 PM or 30 minutes before bedtime, and use the 3-2-1 framework.
Three wins, two lessons, one intention for the morning.
Use a physical notebook.
Don't go down any digital rabbit holes, especially before bed.
And you can start with two minutes if 10 minutes feels like too much.
The dopamine detox clears the noise.
The walking creates space.
The gym builds confidence.
The diet optimizes your biology.
The project gives you purpose.
Reflection is how you track mental and spiritual progress.
Thank you for watching.
If you want to learn a high income skill in today's world or you just want a project to build, like we talked about in the video, check out to our writer.
If you want the full dopamine detox training nutrition, lifestyle plan, check out superhuman90.
And if you want a map to reach the one percent, i highly recommend watching last week's video on the human 30 model, and that video is called how to make progress 10x faster in your life and it's a full guide to doing just that like.
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Thank you for watching.
See you in the next one bye.
