How to Shut Your Brain Off and “Just Do It” (It’s Not What You Think)

Hey, Athletes! How to Shut Your Brain Off and “Just Do It” (It’s Not What You Think) - Episode 186 of The Garage Gym Athlete Podcast is up!

How to Shut Your Brain Off and “Just Do It” (It’s Not What You Think)

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IN THIS 33-MINUTE EPISODE WE DISCUSS:

• This is a Jerred solo podcast where he dives into mindset and motivation.
• Jerred discusses his thoughts on the brain vs the MIND
• Self Determination Theory is a great website to reference
• Jerred highlights the need for a mission or goal - THE WHY
• And A LOT MORE!!

Diving Deeper… 

If you want to go a little bit deeper on this episode, here are some links for you: 

Reference these studies for this week!

• Self Determination Theory website

 Garage Gym Athlete Workout of the Week 

Don't forget to listen to this week's episode!

• How to Shut Your Brain Off and “Just Do It” (It’s Not What You Think)

— 

Thanks for listening to the podcast, and if you have any questions be sure to add it to the comments below!

To becoming better!

- Jerred

Podcast Transcript

Jerred: Hey, real quick before we start the podcast, if you have listened to more than one episode, can you do me a favor and rate and review the show? Now, I'm not big on asking for favors, but we really wanna get this podcast listed in the top of all health and fitness podcasts, not just the fitness category.

This will take you less than a minute, and if you could do that would make us friends forever. And since we refuse all sponsors on the show, this will be my only ask rather than telling you to go check out some supplement or product. We don't actually believe in every other podcast out there.

So please rate and review. Okay, that's it to the podcast. Hey, Jerred Moon here and welcome to the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast. Today I wanna talk a little bit about your brain, or more specifically what I would refer to as your mind. Your, how I differentiate them as your brain is the physical organ, the thing that sits inside your skull.

And the mind is what we battle. Battle every single day when we have to do things that we don't want to, or we're not motivated. And really the mind is everything because I can give you the best program, the best diet, the best tools, the best tips, the best tricks but if you can't manage this one piece of hardware and software that you've been given, you're not gonna make it very far.

And doesn't matter how deep I get into coaching or. How long I've even disciplined myself to do things. There's still always a challenge there, and I think that there always will be, and the conversation always comes back to people not being able to stick with things for long term. How do I stick with it?

What do I do? How do I stay motivated? This will be a thing forever and there's no solving it. But what I find interesting is I pay attention to this stuff. I've paid attention to it for a very long time. I read a lot of research on self-determination theory, which is really cool.

It, trying to demystify some of these things and help put tools in place where people will be able to manage these things a little bit better and do a better job. But I think there are people in the world if we wanna call 'em famous people, influencers, whatever, who are naturally good at a lot of these things.

One person I have in mind is Jocko Wilin. If you are familiar with him he is become the staple, like the epitome of discipline, right? Discipline equals freedom is his whole thing. And sometimes the advice can get boiled down to be tougher.

Just do it. Just try harder. And I love all of those things. But what I'm also starting to realize is there are, even in people like Jocko or David Goggins, those types of people, they may just unknowingly be using psychological triggers. To maintain their motivation or their discipline or to keep doing things that may be difficult.

It's not that, it's not always as simple as just go do it. While that's gonna be a part of my advice that I get into today, it's not the only part of it. And so I wanna talk about how to strategically get yourself to just go do it when you don't want to or when you're struggling. So let's dive into it.

I was reading a lot of self-determination theory in preparation for this podcast. There are tons of different articles. But I don't have one to point you to. You can go to their main website where a lot of this stuff is put together in it's self-determination theory.org, if you ever wanna look.

They just have compiled all the research there. It's really good. Very helpful, very beneficial. But I don't have one particular study that I was looking at in preparation for this podcast episode. I've just was reading through some articles and wrote down some things, and then also put my own spin on a lot of it just from.

Having worked with a lot of people in this kind of capacity, just needing to get things done when you just don't want to. How do we control our brains? How do we control our minds to, to push past, to stay disciplined? So the first thing that I have written down here is you have to have some sort of bigger mission, a bigger goal, a bigger why, and it.

I don't want this to get confused with it needing to be this gigantic overall life mission or this, I want to get to 8% body fat or I wanna back squat 500 pounds. When you're, maybe you're extremely far away from those things. That's not what it has to be. Okay. That's not what this bigger why mission goal thing has to be.

So I don't want you to get overwhelmed with us starting here, and I also don't want you to shut the podcast off because we're already getting a little too oh, I don't struggle with that as much. And I don't have, I don't have this big mission. Or Why you, again, if you feel like you don't have those things, you might, and you might not fully realize it One thing that you should not do is be doing things based off of a suggestion, okay?

Like I'm giving suggestions right now, but these are tools to help you down a path. But I'm not giving you a goal, a suggested goal. I'm not saying you should desire. This thing as your why. So that's where you should not let suggestion come in. This could be in your financial life. This could be in your health, your fitness, your marriage life.

You shouldn't set goals because someone else told you that would be beneficial. And so that's not what you want to do. You want to make sure that you have something connected that's bigger. The reason why you wanna do it, if you are losing weight, We could get into intrinsic versus extrinsic goal.

That's a big part of self-determination theory is looking at extrinsic goal where, an extrinsic goal is really more about just the losing the weight. And the intrinsic would be more about the why behind that. Why would you want to lose weight? Are you trying to be healthier for your family?

So when I'm talking about a why, You need to set that aside. You need to give at least 10 minutes thought to doing that before you embark on anything. Whether that's saving for retirement or losing weight, or running faster or lifting more, trying to get to a body fat percentage. You have to establish your own why or you will never survive when things get hard.

This is not something that I can necessarily help you do, but I can tell you that you need to go think about it because I know that it's especially true for me. I won't do, I'll do, I won't do anything like I will. I won't do any actions if I don't have a real reason for it. If I didn't have a bigger reason on why I exercise every day, I don't think I would just go in there because I think that I should.

Like I just, I could never do that. I always have to have this bigger reason, and you need to be looking for that bigger reason. A lot of times it is, in, in our community, a lot of times it is. I have kids I want to be around to play with my grandkids, those kind of things. I wanna be healthy.

Maybe you wanna optimize your hormone levels. Maybe you want to have more energy. They don't have to be like these big, gigantic. Things, they just need to be a reason that keep bringing you back. So it's I want more energy. It's okay, why do you want more energy? It's I want to be able to go through my entire day without having these big lulls.

Okay, why do you want, that was cuz when I have horrible energy levels, I just can't I'm not the person I wanna be around my family. So this is the bigger why that you need to get across and establish, and I say that because anything else I say won't matter if you don't have that. So spend some time on establishing that.

Why your mission I wanna say goal, but I don't even really mean goal because it's very easy for people to just go set out on a goal, be like, yeah, yep, that's the goal, but have you really answered why you want that goal? I think that's the important thing that I'm getting at. You have to have the why answered.

The why has to be answered. To move to the next step is I actually want you to write down a litmus test question. So a litmus test is testing the validity of an action on the outcome. So will doing x get me closer to y? So will this activity that I plan to do, get me closer to y and or z whatever letters you want to use, being that bigger thing that you set out to do.

So if you were like, Hey I want to live a long, healthy life and be able to play with my grandkids, that's the overarching why. That's why you step into the gym every single day. Now you can start answering questions. This litmus test question be will. Running get me closer to being able to play with my grandkids when I'm older.

Then you could be like, yeah, it's gonna improve my VO two max, my cardio respiratory fitness it's gonna keep me in management of weight, healthy management, weight management, all these kind of things, right? So you can be like, yep, that passes the litmus test. But then it could also not pass the litmus test when you're like, Hey, I think I want to do.

High intensity zone five level intensity training four to five days per week. It's okay, doing that. Get me closer to being able to live a long life and play with my grandkids. And the answer is probably no, because there is a continuum in this health and fitness arena that a lot of people don't wanna pay attention to.

If you're too far on one end, meaning you're sick, you're overweight you're gonna have a lot of problems. There's a lot of stress on the body, but if you go too far the other direction, like if your body fat gets down to. 7% cuz you just went overboard with all of your health and fitness goals.

Now you're putting stress on the body again, and your ho hormone levels are not optimized and you're not sleeping right. And everything gets to be thrown off. And so same with okay, we're doing this ridiculously high intensity training multiple times per week. Help me get, help me live longer and play with my grandkids.

Probably not. It's on the stressor side that's ultimately gonna take you down. So it helps you answer what I should be doing and what I shouldn't be doing. And it could be the same thing with Hey, I'm gonna take a bunch of new, unproven, somewhat dangerous supplements. Will that help me live longer and play with my grandkids?

No. Okay, then I'm not gonna do that either. Okay. And it'll help you avoid taking shortcuts. If you had that specific goal that I'm talking about where you wanna live longer and be able to play with your grandkids, you won't take any shortcut options. You won't, it won't make any sense to. You're in it for the long haul in this specific example.

But you could have a very different goal, a very different why that leads you in a different direction. But actually write down that question, will doing this thing get me closer to what I desire? The ultimate goal? The ultimate why, the ultimate reason I'm here, the reason I'm doing these things?

And you can actually write these things down. I highly encourage you because we can do these things in our mind, but I highly encourage you to write them down. Because there is something about going from the brain to a piece of paper with a pen that just gets it out there. It helps your brain calm down and it helps you buy into it a little bit more.

And that's all we're trying to do is get our own minds to buy into what we're, we know we should be doing already. And that's what you need to do with a litmus test question. So write it down and then you can write down any of the activities that you're doing and see if they all pass the litmus test question.

Okay, so if going back to just being like, I just wanna be a hardcore disciplined person. I go to bed at midnight and I wake up at 4:00 AM Let's just say that's who you are. You sleep four hours a night, so you might think, yeah, being incredibly hardcore, disciplined person is how I get to my goals.

Now let's go to my litmus test question. Will sleeping four hours per night get me closer to living a longer life and being able to play with my grandkids? No. So that hardcore disciplined approach might not be the best activity. If that was your goal. See how easy these things get. Like you don't need to do all these other things and that's more of a suggestion.

From the hardcore influencer type people who might be saying that you need to sleep less and do more, when in reality that might have nothing to do with your goals. If you wanna burn the candle at both ends for a short period of time in order to achieve a goal, hey, maybe you need to do that. I know I've done that as an entrepreneur.

I've had to burn the candle at both ends for 1, 2, 3 years at a time before I just have to completely back off where things break. Sometimes you go through those phases. But when you know your overarching goal, and if there's a time limit on those things, maybe it won't be as bad. Hey, I'm going to burn the candle at both ends for one year in order to achieve this one thing.

I would still say it might not be worth it, but at least you have a reason for you're doing it and you have a time cap. So get the litmus test question going. Then after that, when we get into the day-to-day, the third thing is you need to go micro. I've talked about this a lot on the podcast. I think most of I operate that way.

Like when we did the 300 challenge last year, the daily over decades challenge where we're getting 300 training sessions in a year, 300 minutes per week 300 calories per session. I did 300 level three. So all of those things, and I knew what the goal was. I knew that was the bigger goal, but I never wanted to think about it.

So anytime the team. And we would talk about it and they'd be like, yeah, I just finished workout 167. My brain doesn't work that way and I just, I can't do it. I don't like to see big things like that or big numbers. I like to know ahead of time what the big goal is, set that, and then I just want to know what do I need to do today and what I need to do this week?

Cuz that's about as far as my brain ever wants to think anyway, so I would know that, hey, today it's a 300 calorie training session and I need to do that six times this week. That's it. Then after I had a successful week, I can just mark that as done and forget about it. Okay, cool. Great. At a successful week, I had six training sessions.

It was at least 300 calories and it was an hour per session, so I'm good to go. I'm good to go. Like I don't need to think about what training session this was or anything. So again, anytime anybody asks me, I never knew what training session I was on or how close I was to the goal. I just knew if I was consistent.

In my daily activity and the weekly activity that I was gonna get to where I needed to be. And that's how I basically treated any and every goal from business goals, fitness goals, financial goals. That's what I do if you read Killing Comfort you'll know that my wife and I were in a hundred thousand dollars in a hundred thousand dollars in debt the day one of marriage.

Just we'd accumulated that between cars the, our vehicles and student loans and things like that. And making very little money at the time too. And so I didn't want to think about that big number. I just couldn't, so I knew what it was. I knew the amount, but then I just focused on the micro actions, be like, okay, what can I do this week?

And it might, may have been super tiny weekly decisions of hey, I'm going to not go to Starbucks here, or I'm going to put this amount in savings. And then just slowly chipped away at it. And we were able to pay that debt off pretty fast. So go micro. I think when you go micro, you're not as you're not as tied to this bigger goal and you're not as worried about screwing up when you are on track.

Like another example say you decide a new habit you want is that you wanna run in the morning. You like, you know what? I think I just wanna start running in the morning. And then I've done this exact thing. That's why I'm giving it as an example. So where my brain goes when I set a goal like that is I'm not okay with just it being a run in the morning.

I just know too much about fitness and programming. So my natural tendency is not okay with just being like, yeah, I'll go for a run in the morning. I have to know, if that was the goal, I would then, Break the goal, I'd make it way worse. I'd be like, okay, so we're gonna have to at least run four or five miles every single morning.

And then, you know what? On Monday and Tuesday, or Monday and Wednesday, I'm going to do high intensity intervals or something like that. And then on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we're gonna do zone two, and here are the distances and here are the times. That's where my brain goes. And that's a product of, again, just.

My profession and things I've been doing for a very long time. And that's not what we're trying to do, right? Say my only real goal for going on a run in the morning was to get some morning sunlight, get some movement, extra movement in my day get some breathing in, clear my head, start my day off with a little bit of activity.

What if that's the only goal? I don't need to do all that other crap. I don't need to go overboard. I don't need to track how many times I run. Every I, I'm not trying to do like a habit tracker of how many times I, I rant. I'm just gonna do it when I can and, go do it to the best of my ability when I can.

And have no real goal. I don't care about distance, I don't care about heart rate. Maybe don't even wear a heart rate monitor or a watch. Just go do it, come back, be done. You have to really establish ultimately what your goal is. But my point is, don't. Don't overcomplicate your goals with trying to track too much.

Just go micro. So again, like if you want to start running in the morning, why do you wanna start running in the morning? Is it, like I said, is it more Hey, I wanna clear my head and start my day off? Or am I trying to specifically increase some sort of fitness parameter, like VO two max? And so I need to train a very particular way cuz they're very different.

Very different goals. One could be you get up, you jog a mile in the morning, you come back and then maybe you do a full workout later in the day. Or maybe it is yeah, I'm gonna do interval training, all this other stuff. But my tendency is always to go overboard and that screws me up sometimes.

And I know a lot of you are the same way. You get into wanting to do a goal and you get into a new thing and you want to go all in on it. And that kind of screws you up, like counting macros a lot of times. In the garage of athlete community. My challenge to people is what we call the protein and water challenge, where it's I don't care about your macros.

I don't, I'm not telling you need to, this percentage of carbohydrates, this percentage of fat, this percentage of protein, let's just track our protein and try and hit how much protein that you should be eating today. Oh, and also let's track our hydration, our water, how much we consumed. That's so much easier and such, so much less daunting.

And that might lead to other things. It might lead to a full on diet change or overhaul or tracking your carbohydrates and fat and logging all your food. But that's not where we wanna start. We want to go micro, we wanna just start with something tiny and let's just see where it goes. So go micro is the overarching number three.

Just go as small as you possibly can. That way you can take your brain out of what the bigger thing is. Making sure it still passes that litmus test of okay, why am I doing this again? Why am I doing this morning run? Is it to increase my fitness or is it just to, for my mental health?

Like what is the reasoning? Make sure that question's answered. Now we've reversed ourselves all the way back, so I've gone micro. I've answered the litmus test and I have this bigger why in which I'm trying to achieve. But then, if you follow those three steps, you're still gonna find yourself in this process at times where your mood is just not right, like something's off.

You just, maybe I. You just can't, you still just don't want to, you don't have that drive, you don't have the motivation. You're like, I know this connects to my why. It answers my litmus test. I'm going small. I'm just trying to do like a 10 minute workout today. But damn it, I don't want to, I don't wanna do this at all.

Occasionally you might find yourself in that situation and it's a pretty crappy situation to be in. I know I've been there a few times myself with different things where Even if you've done all these other psychological tricks, you're, you might still just be like, maybe something happened in life or whatever to where it's just hard.

I've had people pass away in my life, had people in the hospital and in those instances, very hard for me. Those are the types of situations I find myself in, where it's very hard for me to like, Push past those and like still try and do the things that I need to do because I still need to show up as a father.

I still need to train even when things are bad, like I still need to push and do those things. So in those situations, this is something I've talked about on the podcast before. The only tool in the tool bag for that are what I call state changes. And this is like completely just.

Getting into the mental side of things, but again, going through the self-determination theory, a lot of these things play out there as well. Sometimes you just need like a jolt to the system, and so most effective ones I've found you can try listening to music that's not super effective for me.

I have had other people listen to it, but it would typically be like headphones on. Loud music that's motivational for you and try to do that for three, five minutes, 10 minutes, even if you don't even wanna do that. Just that's something you could at least force yourself to do. Some people really connect with music and that'd be incredibly helpful.

Cold exposure might be another one. Maybe that's dunking your head in a bowl of ice water or bucket of ice water. Getting in a cold shower, doing a cold plunge, something like that. That one's gonna be a little bit harder to do if you're just in that kind of state of I just feel like I can't do anything.

I can't move. I'm paralyzed. Type mindset. Another one, just go for a walk. This one's really simple. That's typically the easiest thing to do, like physically if you're just like, Not wanting to move forward, or you feel like you're in this really tight spot, just like start walking even if your brain doesn't want to you can take steps and eventually you will leave your house, leave the neighborhood, take those steps and move forward.

Another one that's got, two, two more that have like research behind them. Jumping or bounding seems to actually really elevate mood and help you with some of these changes. So you could do some jump rope or if you have one of those miniature trampolines, that's another great one that can get you out of that cycle of negative thought or whatever.

Mindfulness is another great one that has a lot of research in it. So however you wanna practice mindfulness, this is where This could, some people that could be prayer, sometimes that could just be meditation. Some people can, you can do this with breathing, and breathing is another great one.

In general, just like downloading some sort of breathing app, doing the breathing exercises that's going to go a long way. And then I think, you know that those are the majority of the ones that you'll be able to knock out fairly easily. If you just need that jolt to your system, just throw any of those ideas, this tool in your tool bag if you.

Feel like you're in that situation. And now the last thing I mentioned at the beginning, I mentioned at the end is sometimes it can come across of there's nothing we can do for you. There's no way to help you. You just need to do it. And that's, I feel like that's some of the advice give being put out there for people who might be trying to lose weight and they just, They can't, and it's not that they can't, their bodies are incapable of losing weight.

It's that they can't do the things that they are required to do. Like they can't maintain the consistency in on the nutrition side of things, or they can't maintain the consist consistency in the training side of things. They just can't maintain that consistency. That's the can't. And then the advice can't be just go do it.

That's the worst. Advice. It's like throwing a child into a swimming pool and just saying, swim, swim. But they're drowning. You know what I mean? If there's some capacity in which they could just figure it out and swim and we could say, yeah, sink or swim, but most people are going to sink.

And while I wish and I have the mentality for the sink or swim approach, we're not in a situation where that's okay because too many people need help. And when this many people need help, you need to figure out how can you start to get things done without just jumping into the pool and drowning.

What do we do? How do we help you? How do we make you more consistent in the things that you know you need to do? And that will literally change your life. And you don't wanna revert back to the old version of yourself even after you make some changes. And I have this in my book, killing Comfort, but it's.

The practicing of doing a hard thing. So my actual suggestion in the book is to do a hundred days consecutive days of doing something. So if you feel like you struggle with all these things you have, this is going micro again, but it's like micro with consistency. It's the smallest possible thing that you can imagine for 100 days.

And I don't care if you need, if you're like, goal is to gain 10 pounds in the back squat or if you need to lose 150 pounds if you suck at being consistent, that's the only muscle that we need to work on is your consistency muscle. That's the only muscle that we need to work on is your consistency muscle.

So how do we do that? We pick something for you to be consistent at for a hundred days. And I'm not saying, Hey, go do a workout every day for one hour, for a hundred days, and just be consistent. Again, not helpful. That's what we're struggling with. It's the smallest possible thing that you can agree to for 100 straight days, and I don't care about any other changes.

I don't care if we change your nutrition, your fitness, anything. Cuz right now we're just working on the consistency muscle. If you are that in that bad of a situation where you just cannot get results, you cannot maintain consistency. It's 100 days of the smallest possible thing. So an example, I don't care how small it could be I'm going to walk.

A thousand steps today, and you have a pedometer that does that, and you do that for a hundred days, a thousand. Most people are gonna achieve a thousand steps just by waking up and like doing a little bit of life, okay? Or maybe it's drink 24 ounces of water, 16 ounces of water, whatever. Maybe you, maybe the first thing that you do in the morning is drink coffee.

Maybe it's drink water first for a hundred days. So all I'm asking you to do, Is to get a glass of water in the morning and drink that and track it for a hundred days. That's it. That's how simple and how small we're going. But how small you go is how inconsistent you are. Like how much help do you need?

Some people could do a hundred days of consistency in almost anything. If that's you. I'm obviously not talking to you. I'm talking to people who struggle with consistency. What have you ever done for a hundred days straight? And if you're like, no, I think I could do a workout every day for a hundred days straight, and then you get 45 days in and then you don't do a workout on day 46.

No, that was too hard for you. I'm saying something that's easy enough to do it for a hundred days straight, and it's a near guarantee that you won't miss. What is that thing, and then you're gonna track it. That's adding a secondary thing. But you can do this. Put a piece of paper on your bathroom mirror or whatever.

Just track it. Whatever you can do for a hundred days straight. Now, what does this do for you? One, it, it gives you that, just do it. It helps you exercise that. Just do it muscle that people talk about like that you just need to go do it. Just go do it. Just track the food. Just do the workout.

Yeah, but how do we practice just doing it? How do we practice that? And this is how we practice it. And so you're gonna practice this consistency. This just doit muscle, and then you're going to build off of it after your first a hundred days are over. Be, wow, I actually did something for a hundred days.

Now you're gaining momentum, and we're gonna look backwards to what we just achieved. All right? We just did something for a hundred days. We've never tracked something for a hundred days and done it for a hundred days, even though it was just me drinking a glass of water. I did that for a hundred days straight.

I'm feeling more hydrated. My energy levels are a little bit better because I'm more hydrated and I've done that every day for 100 straight days. I'm super proud of myself. I have this momentum. What can I do next that's gonna leapfrog you into the next hundred days where it might be a little bit harder of a thing and you just keep doing this.

It's not sexy. It's the reality of what it takes to get things done. You have to go small, you have to go tiny, and you have to just do it, but you just doing it is different for every single person. What you need to go work on and just do is different for every person and what you can handle. So make sure that you can handle what you're gonna do for the next a hundred days.

And that's it. If you can do all of these things to recap, have your bigger why, make sure that question is answered your bigger mission, your goal. And don't do peop. Don't set goals or have a why that's suggested from someone else. That has to come truly 100% from within you to actually write out the litmus test of everything that you're planning to do.

Will this thing activity get me closer to doing to my goal or whatever my why? Three go micro. Once you have the bigger goal set in place. You've answered the litmus test, just go micro with your day and your week. And then if you just get in a really bad spot, implement some state changes periodically whenever you have to.

Music jumping, cold, exposure any of those things. And then lastly, make sure you're exercising your consistency in your just doit muscle by working on something consistently for a hundred days that will challenge you. You're gonna be able to do it so you can build some of that momentum and keep driving forward.

So that's it for today on this podcast. Hopefully you got something helpful out of it if you really feel like this podcast would help someone else. Okay. Like I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast where you're not in a position where we can just tell people to do it. We have to give people tools and tricks.

If you feel like someone would benefit from this podcast, please share it with them. Share it with anybody who's willing to listen, and maybe they can make some life changes that will get them to the next level and get them where they need to go. But that's it for this one. Remember, if you don't kill comfort will kill you.

To the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast. If you wanna learn more, go to garage gym athlete.com. You can learn about our training. Let us send you a copy of our book, the Garage Gym Athlete, or you can even get featured on the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast. Thanks for listening.