Lower Stress With an End-of-Day Ritual | Dr. Cal Newport & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | I have a shutdown ritual, which clearly demarcates the end of work and the start of the night

00:00:09.800 | after work.

00:00:12.340 | And the shutdown ritual—so it has to—you have to close open loops, right?

00:00:16.440 | So you got to make sure this is like a review type period.

00:00:19.760 | Let me look back at my inbox and look at my plan.

00:00:22.120 | Let me look at my time block and my calendar.

00:00:26.240 | Really make sure—there's nothing urgent that needs to be dealt with that I didn't,

00:00:31.400 | and there's nothing that's just in my head that I don't want to forget that's not

00:00:35.280 | written down somewhere.

00:00:36.280 | Like, take care of all of that, right?

00:00:37.280 | So you review all these things.

00:00:39.000 | You get what am I going to do tomorrow.

00:00:40.000 | You don't have to build your whole plan for tomorrow, but you have a sense for it.

00:00:43.320 | And then you need some sort of demonstrative thing you do to indicate that you finished

00:00:49.560 | a routine, right?

00:00:50.860 | So my longtime newsletter readers know I used to actually have a phrase.

00:00:54.420 | I would say, "Schedule shutdown complete," like a crazy phrase, right?

00:00:58.600 | It's not how normal people talk, right?

00:01:01.080 | Now I have a planner that has like a checkbox that says "shutdown complete" next to

00:01:05.520 | it.

00:01:06.520 | The reason why that is a demonstrative anchor is that you use this then for cognitive behavioral

00:01:11.080 | therapy because at first people have a hard time shutting down work.

00:01:14.480 | I mean, I invented this because I had a very hard time shutting down working on my dissertation.

00:01:18.280 | I just—what, this proof doesn't work and blah, blah, blah.

00:01:21.300 | So what you do is when you get a rumination post-shutdown, "Hey, what about—what's

00:01:26.080 | going on with our work?

00:01:27.080 | Are we doing the right thing?

00:01:28.080 | Do we forget this or that?"

00:01:29.280 | Instead of engaging in the rumination, well, it's like, "No, I think we're okay.

00:01:32.780 | Let me think about my schedule tomorrow.

00:01:34.280 | What's my plan?"

00:01:35.280 | You instead can just say, "I said that crazy phrase," or "I checked that box."

00:01:39.920 | I wouldn't have said that phrase unless I had gone through everything and made sure

00:01:43.320 | that I had a good plan and nothing's being missed and it was okay to shut down work.

00:01:47.480 | Because of that, I'm not going to engage with your rumination.

00:01:50.520 | I said the weird thing.

00:01:51.520 | Let's get back to what we're doing.

00:01:53.000 | This is like cognitive behavioral therapy that after a month or so, you are really able

00:01:57.440 | to actually effortlessly disengage from work and do everything—all the other stuff that

00:02:03.040 | matters without having the constant ruminations about work, which gives your mind an actual

00:02:07.980 | break to do other things.

00:02:09.620 | So I mean this is more mental health and productivity.

00:02:13.240 | But for me, it was critical.

00:02:14.480 | I mean I can really remember when I came up with this, exactly where I was in my grad

00:02:18.940 | student career.

00:02:19.940 | I mean there's just too many ideas and concerns that were just roiling.

00:02:24.920 | Once I did this, it took a few weeks and then I could actually shut down and go on and do

00:02:30.360 | other things.

00:02:31.360 | Yeah.

00:02:32.360 | The paired associative nature of the brain can make it really problematic if you're

00:02:36.760 | thinking about work at the dinner table.

00:02:39.000 | You start to associate the dinner table with work.

00:02:41.660 | When Matt Walker came here to do this six-part series that's soon to be released and we

00:02:47.240 | were discussing insomnia, he said one of the major issues with insomnia is people who have

00:02:51.640 | trouble falling asleep or staying asleep will often stay in bed when they can't sleep.

00:02:55.280 | And then the bed becomes associated with challenges with sleep, hence the recommendation that

00:03:00.280 | virtually every sleep coach and sleep scientist recommends that people actually, if they can't

00:03:05.720 | sleep for 20 minutes or so of effort, then you get up and leave the bed and go someplace

00:03:09.600 | else until you feel sleepy enough to go back and try or fall asleep on the couch elsewhere.

00:03:14.840 | I put that in as a note to you.

00:03:19.120 | But this seems incredibly important also for enrichment of relationships with spouses and

00:03:24.560 | children and people in your life.

00:03:26.080 | I mean, the problem is the first thing that we ask people when they walk in the door typically

00:03:29.880 | was how was work today?

00:03:30.880 | Or how was work?

00:03:31.880 | What did you do today?

00:03:33.320 | Tell me about your school day.

00:03:34.360 | Tell me about your work.

00:03:35.360 | Maybe we need to come up with better questions.

00:03:37.120 | Yeah.

00:03:38.120 | Like here's something interesting we could do.

00:03:39.680 | Or here's like something I read about unrelated to work.

00:03:42.200 | No, I think it makes a huge difference.

00:03:44.400 | Thank you.

00:03:45.400 | Thank you for tuning in to the Huberman Lab Clips channel.

00:03:47.040 | If you enjoyed the clip that you just viewed, please check out the full length episode by

00:03:50.900 | clicking here.

00:03:51.920 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Lower Stress With an End-of-Day Ritual | Dr. Cal Newport & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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