- All right, next question is from Tanya. I find my inner voice very cruel and I struggle with negative thoughts. Do you have any advice on how I can overcome these on a daily basis? - So Tanya, this is a very common thing. I'm gonna start with that. I think this is misunderstood about mental health issues from people who don't suffer from them is how often the common source of the mental health issues is these inner voices.

So psychologists will call this negative rumination. It's a voice in your head that is constantly pointing out negative things. So for anxiety, the negative ruminations are those looking to the future with concern. What about this? What about that? What if this doesn't go well? What if this disaster happens?

What if, you know, it's looking to the future and constantly pointing out things that it's worried about. For depression, it's the same voice. It's just often looking to the past. Why did you do that? Oh my God, that was the wrong thing to do. You're so worthless. People are thinking about that.

I'm sure people are talking about it. No one, look at that event. That guy who snubbed you, yeah, it's because no one respects you. So it's just looking back at your life so far like a, you know, upset movie critic just pointing out everything that went wrong. That's why there's such a connection between anxiety and depression.

They go back and forth. It's your ruminative voice and it's just kind of where it's aimed. And once that voice has a really strong foothold in your head, it's got a real comfy chair and it knows that, oh, I'm gonna be listened to. Then it can change its, you know, themes, but it's in there screwing around with your brain.

And that's why we often find those two particular mental health issues so tightly intertwined. So it's a very common, well-understood issue. I think of it a lot like knee pain. You know, it's a, oh, I have this thing. It's really common. It's really annoying. I should do something about this because otherwise, it makes my life really hard right now and my knee hurts, but also because it hurts.

It's making me walk differently and I might get like even bigger problems going forward. Let's get it treated. And that's the right way to think about overwhelming negative ruminations. Your knee's hurting you. It's time to get it fixed. There is a lot of good approaches to fixing rumination. In particular, second wave and third wave psychotherapy are essentially focused like a laser on ruminations and how to dissipate it.

With first wave psychotherapy, which is talk therapy, the Freud influence therapy and analysis, this is what people think about from Woody Allen movies and is talking about your kids and your childhood and your life. Second and third wave psychotherapy are much more evidence-based and it says we need to tackle ruminations.

So second wave psychotherapy is from understanding my history correctly, and I hope I'm getting my terminology correct. Second wave psychotherapy is defined most notably by cognitive behavioral therapy. This is where you directly address ruminations and point out the distortions in the thinking. You give names to the distortions. You separate yourself from the rumination and you try to diffuse their power.

Tanya, if you're looking for an introduction to second wave psychotherapy, the proper book to look at is titled "Feeling Good." Big bestseller from either the 1970s or the 1980s that walks through all the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy. Third wave psychotherapy is best defined by ACT, acceptance commitment therapy.

It's similar, again, it's rumination-based, but here it has more of an Eastern-motivated approach of noting all the negative ruminations, not resisting them, but also not entertaining them, and persisting with committing to useful value-driven behavior regardless. So it's a sort of diffusing of, it's just this thing that's, there's this voice and I have a name for it and I have a name for the character and he's just in there doing all this chatter and I sort of like, okay, I'm good to see you there, but I'm gonna go on and do this thing I think is important.

So you see like ACT, for example, ACT is very effective for anxiety-related issues, panic attacks, for example, where it's like, well, yeah, bad things could happen, but this stuff matters, I'm just gonna go forward with it. Cognitive behavioral therapy tends to be very good for more of a negative rumination on your sort of depressive ruminations.

So you can intervene, it's like, no, that's stupid. Not everyone was embarrassed by me. And the fact that that guy said this thing at the meeting doesn't mean that everyone thinks I'm dumb. So CBT is very good for that backward-thinking rumination. ACT is very good for forward-thinking rumination. It's like, that stuff could happen, probably won't, but I'm gonna live my life and you get used to it.

So they have different approaches. If you're looking for the good consumer public-facing book on third-wave psychotherapy, look at "The Happiness Trap," which we talked about in a recent book as well. So Tanya, buy those books first. See which of these resonates more with you. And I would read both of these books and see which of these resonates more with your particular brand of rumination.

It's possible that just the ideas in these books themselves, you start doing the exercises and you immediately see improvement. This happens with a lot of people. If you're not seeing improvement immediately, then you get a professional therapist involved. What do they do? They're professionals that are administering these evidence-based ideas on minimizing rumination.

They're the brand equivalent of the knee doctor. The reason why I'm suggesting you buy these books first is that when you're looking for a therapist, now you know what type you're looking for. And so if you're dealing with negative ruminations on your past and CBT really resonates, then you're looking for a cognitive behavioral therapist.

If you're dealing with anxiety and forward-facing ruminations and the ideas from ACT are resonating, then you look for a therapist that says they're an ACT practitioner. So now you can be kind of selective in who you're choosing. One of our sponsors, for example, BetterHelp, is an easy way to get involved in professional therapy that's cheaper and more flexible than trying to find someone who happens to be open nearby, but maybe you also just know of someone nearby.

But this is what I would say. Take this seriously. What you're facing is incredibly common, but you do want to get on top of it. We have a lot of tools to get on top of it. Learn the tools, and if needed, find a professional to help you administer them.

- All right, let's do another question, Jesse. - Next question's from Mark. I have a good routine in place for my deep work. My desk is cleared from all documents, same for my computer. I set out exactly what I want out of the session and how long it should take.

I then do a deep, do a loop around the inside of the building twice, clearing my head while listening to binaural beats. I then do two minutes of breathing exercises outside. Then as soon as the door opens, it's showtime. My problem is shower work. When I block off even to do specific shower work, my mind wanders all the time, and I find it difficult to get things done.

Do you do anything ritual-wise before shower work? - Well, first of all, I like this deep work ritual. - Yeah. - What do you have? Okay, let's summarize. Clean desk, clean computer desktop, lay out a plan for the deep work session, what I'm going to do and how long it's going to take, a loop around the inside of the building twice while listening to these, I don't know what this was either, binaural beats.

- I think you guys are from Huberman. - Oh, okay, excellent. So it's probably a specific, what's this, like a white noise type thing? - Yeah. - Okay. Two minutes of breathing exercise outside, and then opens the door and goes into work. Cool deep work ritual. We talk about these all the time.

Deep work is unnatural, and so we have to sort of trick our brain into wanting to do it. So having a really multimedia, multi-sensory, highly repetitive ritual that comes right before deep work, eventually your brain builds this automatic reflexive connection that you finish this ritual and it's ready to execute.

There's a good question. Should we be doing something similar for shallow work? And I think it's a good question because I think we don't treat shallow work with enough respect, at least from the standpoint of cognitive preparation. Now, something we've been talking about more and more on this show is the cost of loading up a cognitive context and how this is difficult and takes time.

So like before you're doing deep work, one of the reasons why these rituals are helpful, like Mark just talked about, is not just because it reflexively puts your mind into a deep work mode, but you're clearing out, you're giving your brain time to clear out unrelated old cognitive context and load up the context of the work you're about to do.

Part of what's effective about this ritual then is that Mark reviews everything he's going to do at the beginning of the ritual, initiating the loading of that context. And this ritual takes enough time that he can start clearing out the context of whatever email or Zoom nonsense he was doing right before the deep work session.

And the ritual is all activities that aren't gonna trigger other types of context as well. It's listening and walking and nothing that's related to work. And so part of why this deep work ritual is effective is that he shows up loaded from a brain perspective to do exactly that work.

Now I think a shallow work often requires those contexts as well, but we don't treat it with the same respect. So it might seem like the most shallow thing in the planet that I'm gonna answer emails. This isn't deep work. I'm not writing the great American novel. I'm answering emails.

But from a cognitive standpoint, each of those emails has this complicated social, professional context that you need to fully load to figure out how to carefully word your response. And if you just haphazardly just jump in and start typing emails, your brain's like, I am not ready for this.

And then when you switch to another email from a client that's completely unrelated to what you were just doing, your brain plays the comic break squealing sound, like, wait a second, we're not ready to do this either. And you feel that real resistance. And I think that's what Mark is pointing out here.

It's because you don't have the right stuff loaded up. You're trying to force information out of your brain that it's not ready to do. And so this is a good time to declare that for certain types of shallow work, yeah, let's ritualize some of that as well. So for email, let's start with that example.

Let's take your email inbox, and I'm gonna give you a ritual right now. Let's go through the single threading exercise we talked about earlier in the show. Break up the emails into different cognitive context subject matters. If you're using Gmail, you can label and archive them. So they're all with a common label.

By the way, here's another hack on that. You don't have to actually give content specific names to these labels, because there could be over time, dozens and dozens of different relevant cognitive context. Just label them context one, context two, context three, context four, context five, up to context 10.

Doesn't matter what the names are. It's just you have some way of, okay, oh, there's a bunch of emails about this very specific thing. I'll call that context three. So do that, right? So figure out like what are the different topics I have to answer in my inbox? Label them, put them together and get them all out of sight.

Now you can say, what am I gonna tackle first? Context one. Now I'm gonna do the two laps in the building that I did before my deep work. But now the point of these two laps is to begin loading up the relevant circuits for context one. And just think in your head while you're walking, okay, these emails are all about a conference that's coming up.

Let's start thinking about the conference. What's going on? Let me get that context loaded. You sit down at your desk, load up just that context. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Answer those emails. All right, what's context two? I'm up two laps around the building. Switching to that context, starting to think through, okay, these are all emails about a project.

Where am I on the project? Well, you know, what do I really need to do here? You know what? We're really behind. I think maybe we need to do a more drastic reset. Start thinking about it as a way to get the context shifted. Do a couple laps around the building.

Sit down, boom, email, email, email, email. So why don't we do the same type of rituals around this particular shallow work task? I like that. Let me give you another shallow work ritual 'cause I'm on a roll now, Mark. I like your idea. I've got a Zoom meeting. All right, well, here's what I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna put that Zoom meeting on my calendar and I'm gonna put 20 minutes after that Zoom meeting on my calendar right after. As soon as I put that meeting on my calendar, I extended that appointment by 20 minutes. And so as soon as this meeting is over, I'm gonna write down all my notes and I'm gonna just walk and think about that meeting.

Laps around the building, walk around the block. All right, what just happened there? What do I really need to do next? You know, was that really a good idea? Are we missing some information? What are the right steps here? Actually, I should not do those steps and just talk to Paul and like, we probably need to just...

This is gonna be a longer conversation and maybe we... And you just start thinking about it. You're loading, you know, you're thinking about it. You're trying to make sense of it. You sit down and you send out the emails. You update all your to-do list. You go in your calendar.

You're like, this is great. This is all out of my mind. And I still have 10 minutes left. Now I can just reset. All right, what's next? So we have a ritual there following shallow work to process all the details, close all the loops and give your brain a breather.

So again, a shallow work ritual that could be important. I'll give you one more as long as we're thinking about it. What about physical tasks? I gotta get this thing from the store and mail this letter. Put those all together. Say, great, I put these all together. I have a whole hour.

I'm listening to, you know, I have a book I'm excited to listen to on tape and I'm just gonna use this almost meditatively. Just I have this big list. I can start checking things off while I'm here. I'll go to this store, then I'll go to that store and just sort of feel this feel of just physical progress of tasks being checked off your list while you're listening to an interesting book or something and make that into a whole organized ritual of I'm now in task mode and I'm really leaning into it.

So I think the bigger point here, Mark, which you've sparked in me, which I'm liking, is this notion that shallow work can be as cognitively demanding as deep work in certain aspects, in particular, when it comes to the complexity of the context surrounding different types of shallow work. So having some rituals that respect that might make the same shallow work seem much easier.

So we shouldn't be dismissive about shallow work. Well, that's just something you can do whenever and it's easy and all I care about is the deep work. I really need to care about my mind. We gotta care about our minds for everything we do in the knowledge for context, deep and shallow combined.

Hey, if you liked this video, I think you'll really like this one as well.