the kind of mind that's immune to stress

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Everybody's life is full of stress, but some people feel fulfilled, others feel burnt out, and others feel like they're on their way out. And the difference lies between stress and overwhelm.

[00:00:09]Overwhelm is a result of an uncontrolled feedback loop, and we've all experienced what an uncontrolled feedback loop looks like. If you've ever heard the sound a speaker produces when you keep the microphone too close to it, then you know exactly what I'm talking about. It sounds a little bit like this. So, what's happening here is that the speaker produces a sound, the microphone picks it up, amplifies it, puts it to the speaker a second time, and then picks it up again, and so and so forth until like one of the control systems kick in or the speaker literally explodes. And that's exactly how stress works as well. Stress can produce stress, stress can produce more stress, and then stress can produce even more stress, and before you know it, the system breaks down. So, the topic of this video is how to prevent that from happening, and also how to modulate recovery such that we live a not a stress-free life, because that doesn't exist, but rather a fulfilling life. So, first I'm going to share with you exactly how I learned this from the army, and then I'm going to share with you the exact tips that you can use to put this into action right now. This is the exact biology research lab that I was working in many years ago as I started to earn my PhD in genetics and molecular biology. I would spend more than 10 hours per day in this exact location, in this exact chair, working on the centrifuges, working on the This is a little machine that you use to separate molecules using electric fields. And all this stuff was not actually stressful. I enjoyed doing it.

[00:01:24]What I did find stressful was actually the conference room. Every week on Friday, we would meet up as a research group and we'd present our findings and our research, our progress. And I hated this because I always felt like I had the least to report, and all these talented, smart grad students were always lapping me. Until that point, I always felt that my intelligence was enough to get through anything. Because throughout high school, throughout college as well, and especially when I was even younger than that, I was always praised by parents and teachers for being smart. So, that became a part of my identity. Became a thing which fueled my ego, but it wasn't cutting it anymore. I felt like a deer in the headlights. There's so much stuff that is expected of me. So much stuff on my task list. They say that the responses to a threat is fight or flight. There's also a third one, which is freeze, which is exactly what stress feels like. This is exactly what overwhelm feels like.

[00:02:21]There was mornings that I'd wake up, I would literally want to shoot myself.

[00:02:24]So, instead of that, I joined the military.

[00:02:26]>> [laughter] >> It was in the army that I actually learned what overwhelm actually was. And I wish I'd learned this before. I wish somebody just told me what it was and how I can deal with it years ago, but I didn't. And that's why this video is made for you. Overwhelm is the exact tactical situation where the formation has no room to maneuver. Cannot go forward, cannot go back, cannot go left, cannot go right. Overwhelm only happens when you stop moving and you have no option but to stop moving. Therefore, so long as you are moving, you are not overwhelmed. takes being overwhelmed from a mental feeling to a tactical battlefield reality. This is a sentence which I want you to carry with you.

[00:03:02]Overwhelm is a choice. So long as you can choose to move, you are technically not overwhelmed. So, how did the army teach this? The army never teaches by theory, it always teaches by doing. So, the drills gave us a challenge to solve and the reward which they promised if we did this challenge was a trip to the PX.

[00:03:20]The PX is kind of like a strip mall. You can get food to eat, you can buy stuff.

[00:03:23]And what I really wanted from there was a strawberry milkshake, but that wasn't the main incentive. The biggest incentive that the drills dangled in front of us was that we would get our phones back for about 10 minutes. And it was important because at this point in the training, the boys had been away from their families for months at that point. There were There was guys who had young children who they haven't talked to for months, wives, family members who are sick, parents, all this kind of stuff. So, everybody wanted to get that phone call. So, it was a very strong reward for us. And before I give you the challenge, I have to give you some context. This is what a military barracks looks like. They call it a bay. So, this is what it looks like when seen from the side. What the drills wanted us to do, here was the challenge, right? They wanted us to get all the bunks which were on the top layer and move them such that they were staggered leaving kind of a a walk-through area underneath. And they wanted it done in less than 30 minutes. They said they would come back and check in 30 minutes.

[00:04:22]If we succeeded, we would get that reward. And if we failed, well, certainly we would get some kind of punishment. So, as soon as the drills left, the guys started to move. And that's expected because these are a bunch of young, testosterone-fueled, aggressive young guys who want to get [ __ ] done. So, of course, they start to move almost immediately when the drills leave because they have that uh ticking time bomb. 30 minutes, the drills are going to come back. The guys on the left side of the bay were moving the bunks one step to the right. And the guys on the right side of the bay, without consulting with the other teams, started to move the bunks one step to the left.

[00:04:52]So, before you know it, there would be a huge commotion and confusion at the center when nobody knows where the bunks are supposed to move. And that was kind of the expectation. The drills probably expected the bay to look something like this at the end of the 30 minutes with complete chaos. And as soon as I saw this disorder start to emerge, I realized what was going on. The drills wanted us to use the training that we had been given. So, me and the other older guys in the platoon called the entire unit to order. We had everybody line up and just stop doing anything.

[00:05:20]So, the first step of this process is step one, pause. So, before you jump into the fray, you always pause to assess the situation so that you don't make it worse than it has to be. Now, this step sounds simple, and it is the easiest step to accidentally skip because it feels passive. It feels like a waste of time. It feels like you should go to step two and step three immediately. But, that's not true. This is the first step, and it's the first step for a reason. Now, we're not trying to spend all day here. We're not trying to procrastinate. We're not trying to defer the decisions. All we are trying to do is allow us to take control of the problem space rather than allow the problem space to take control of us. The second step was to plan, literally draw it out. Draw out what needs to happen.

[00:05:58]Humans are visual creatures. It is far easier to get something done once you see what done looks like. So what we did is we literally took out a whiteboard and drew out exactly what this is and told them what the plan would be. And once everybody knew the rules, step three was only too easy. All we had to do was we had to get all guys next to their specific bunks. And once we had them all in place, we had them take out their multi-tools. It's like a little screwdriver, you can think of it.

[00:06:22]Unscrew all the cots. And we had everybody take the cot right next to them, lift it up, move five paces left, and then set them down and bolt them in place. That's it. The whole maneuver took maybe five minutes. This exact task, which the drills expected us to fail in 30 minutes, was done in less than five minutes. It took five minutes of planning and five minutes of execution. We were done in about 10 minutes. But I don't want you to forget that the first step of this was at one minute of pause. So that's what the plan, pause, move cycle looks like. This is literally what military commanders use in the field in order to make tactical decisions. Now you're probably thinking, "Well, I'm not in basic training. I'm not a military commander.

[00:07:04]How does it apply to me?" So first step you'll remember is the pause. Now how do you pause? It is not a passive activity.

[00:07:10]It is actually a very important step, and this is what it looks like in action. The feeling of stress and overwhelm happens when you have so much [ __ ] going on you don't know where to start. So let's find out where to start.

[00:07:20]This is what's called an Eisenhower matrix. You arrange your tasks, the priorities that you have, in the order of impact and urgency. The higher up it is, the more impact the task has upon completion. On the x-axis you have urgency. So the more right it is, the more urgent the task is. This is the exact Eisenhower matrix that I used many months ago when I was doing the six-figure launch. I felt so overwhelmed and so stressed because there's so many thoughts in my mind as to what I needed to get done and what order I would do them in. But once I put them on paper and imposed order upon it, then became that much easier to start executing. And the thing is, you can only really do one task at a time. So even if you have a hundred different tasks that need to get done, it doesn't matter. You can only really do one task at a time. Now, this can be a source of stress for somebody, but for me, it's actually a source of freedom because they can only really do one task at a time. All I got to do is figure out what the hell that task has to be and then start working on it.

[00:08:15]That's it, right? I don't have to worry about any other tasks because I literally have no capacity to do it more than one task at a time. So how do you choose that one task? The answer is, low-key you don't. So this is how I like to do it and of course different people are different, but after you arrange your task in the Eisenhower matrix, you realize that the only task which really matter are the high impact urgent ones, which makes sense. But then you might have more than one task which fits in this quadrant. So all you got to do is take out a highlighter, highlight what you think are the most three important tasks. So it doesn't have to be in order because it's hard to find out what exactly the highest priority task is.

[00:08:50]Just pick three.

[00:08:51]Don't have to be perfect. And then start working on literally any of these high priority items. You might be wrong. You might realize upon working that actually you need to do something else. That happens all the time. But the thing is you've started moving. And like I said before, if you start moving, then you're not overwhelmed. You can set this piece of paper out in the sun all day long and it won't burn. Nothing will happen.

[00:09:12]It'll just hit heated up moderately.

[00:09:13]Take a magnifying glass and focus those sunbeams upon a small surface area and suddenly the paper catches fire. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to focus all our attention on a single point, on a single task. Imagine if I try to do all these tasks and I just switched back and forth between them every 10 minutes. I would get nowhere.

[00:09:30]In other words, I would just moderately heat this paper. But if I have this magnifying glass and I focused all my attention on like one task, then I could actually burn through it and get it done. That is what this process is about. The process of planning, sorry, the process of of pausing is to pick out what task is going to get done. That's what the tactical pause looks like.

[00:09:48]That's step one. So, now let's move on to step two. Step two is the planning phase. So, this is the most important thing in the planning phase is you got to define what done looks like. Write down what done looks like for a task.

[00:10:01]Now, this might seem like a simplistic step. Why is this important? The reason is because every task leads to other tasks. And this is not a bad thing, but this can be a source of massive stress because it feels like every single task you do leads to more work. As Sisyphus was a hero in Greek mythology who was cursed by Zeus to push this boulder up a hill. But every time he reaches the top of the hill, the boulder rolls down, he has to do it again and again. It's a punishment. And that's why people get stressed out of their minds is because every time they finish a task, that two tasks jump up. And they finish finish two tasks, four tasks jump up. It feels like you're fighting the Hydra. So, if you don't define what done looks like, you never feel rewarded for doing anything because every time you do something, it feels like you just have more work to do. And that brings us neatly to the reward section of the planning phase. This is important, boys and girls. Like this is actually so important and I I don't know why it took me years to figure this out. So, you got to pick a sufficiently motivating reward. Most of us do whatever we do in terms of work as a result of the threat of punishment. We're always running away from something. We don't want to let our boss down. We don't want to be poor. We don't want to fail in our exams. Like whatever the thing is, we don't want to disappoint our parents. We're always running from pain. But instead, how about we design our behaviors, our work based on obtaining rewards rather than running from the stick, running from punishment. That's what I think of. This is a special question that I ask myself is what would it look like if this was fun? This is the TBR model of behavior change. Trigger, behavior, and reward.

[00:11:27]Trigger is what starts the behavior.

[00:11:29]Reward is what you get at the end, at the result of the behavior. The way I think of it is kind of look like Stonehenge. You have the behavior supported upon triggers and rewards. And the lesson for this video is that you can do anything if you have a clear trigger and a sufficient reward. This is so funny because I was doing a a coaching call recently. There's this member in my community, shout out to Arda, who said that he wanted to be more consistent with going to the gym. He said that he had been using the TBR model. He had a trigger, he had a reward, but he just wasn't becoming more consistent. So, I asked him, "Imagine that I tell you in 30 days if you just were consistent with going to the gym, I would give you $1 million. Would you manage to do it?" He's like, "Well, yeah. If I had thought I was going to get a million dollars, then for sure I'd be more consistent." At the same time, I said that, "Hey, imagine if at the morning I would come into your room and I would take you by the shoulders and take you to the gym every single morning. Would you be more likely to be consistent?" He said, "Well, yeah." So, I said, "Okay. So, it means that the trigger is not strong enough. If a behavior is not being done, it means that the trigger is not strong enough or the reward is not incentivizing enough."

[00:12:30]That's it. Because if the trigger was strong enough and the reward was big enough, then you would do the behavior.

[00:12:35]It's that simple. So, the question becomes, "Well, what kind of rewards can you use?" This is what I use.

[00:12:40]Everybody's rewards will be different because we are rewarded by different things. Every time I make a video, I pay for a professional massage. It's relaxing, it's good for the body, and in Hawaii, they actually have a huge massage culture. They have um like massage schools, which provide a really, really good quality product for like 50 bucks. Very cheap for what it is. So, it's an easy, healthy, rewarding reward that I set out for myself every time I create a video. And the second thing is a croissant and coffee. Now, it's not you know, it's not a fancy thing. It's a very simple thing, but it gives me a lot of reward. I find it very pleasurable. And then a day in the beach. You just got to find out what's rewarding to you. And of course, you can do other things. You can spend time with the girl you like. You can go watch a movie. Like this is funnily enough, this is the reward which I've set for myself for producing this video which I'm recording right now. I thought the trailer was epic and I really want to watch this movie. But if I just went and watch this movie, then I would have wasted an opportunity to reward myself.

[00:13:37]The reward gives you more pleasure and happiness if you will actually earned it. I will only allow myself to watch this movie once I complete this video.

[00:13:45]That opens up a very important topic because this model, the TBR model, can be misused if you don't understand what you're doing. It is trigger, behavior followed by reward. It is not trigger reward behavior. The biggest problem of modernity is that you can get the reward before the behavior. Our human brain is the most sophisticated information processing system in the known universe.

[00:14:04]It has a very specific way of understanding behaviors and rewards.

[00:14:07]Start to put the reward before the behavior, you start to [ __ ] your brain.

[00:14:11]I said that I would watch the movie after I finish this video, but it's going to be a temptation to say, "You know what? Let me watch this movie and I'll do the video afterwards." In other words, let me get the reward first and I'll do the work afterwards. This temptation always will exist. You're basically [ __ ] yourself in two different ways. The first is you make the reward feel less good because you feel like you didn't earn it. So the reward feels bitter in your mouth. The second thing is that you've lost an opportunity to train this behavior reward pairing. If your brain is taught that you can just get the reward without doing the behavior, then the brain is obviously going to go for that because that's a shortcut. That's why fast food is addicting. That's why porn is addicting. That's why watching TikTok or scrolling on your phone is addicting.

[00:14:52]That's why Tinder is addicting. All these things are addicting because you can you can just get the reward without the preceding behavior. But this is the most important point. Unearned reward doesn't actually feel good. It feels good for a few seconds and then goes away. That's why you end up feeling hollow. It's not the reward. Like people think that the reward is the reason why you feel hollow. No, it's not. It's actually because you haven't done the work and you've just gotten an unearned reward.

[00:15:17]And at the same time, an earned reward feels great. You feel proud of yourself.

[00:15:21]You feel strong and you feel like you have agency to do future things because you've paired behaviors with rewards.

[00:15:28]It's the TBR model. You have to do the behavior before you get the reward. And finally, let's go to step three. This is the last step is the move step. So, we talked about pause, plan, and move. You need this to kind of finish out this model. The first thing you want to do is to collect the tools that you expect to need. Now, tools can be many different things. First one is just money.

[00:15:47]Sometimes you can just solve the problem by throwing money at it. If that's the case and you have the money, then you don't have a problem. So, just do that.

[00:15:53]Second thing is connections. You might know people who have skills or experience that might help you make that task easier for you. Don't feel afraid to ask for help cuz at the end of the day, the only thing which matters is if you got the work done. You've produced results. And if producing results means that you got to ask for help, then that's what it means. You got to ask for help. Third thing is now you have AI.

[00:16:12]Every time you're completing tasks, feel free to ask AI, especially Claude Sonnet. Like that's the AI which I recommend is Claude Sonnet. Ask it how to do the task, how to make it simpler.

[00:16:23]Brainstorm with the AI. And here's the thing. Remember I talked about the Eisenhower matrix earlier in this video?

[00:16:28]You can use AI to make that for you. If you have your entire task list, you can feed it to the AI and ask it to make the Eisenhower matrix for you. Now, will it be perfect? Maybe not, but it'll give you the first step like this and then you can make any refinements that you need to make. And lastly, there's other [ __ ] that you need. Notebooks, pens, a clean desk, software. Just assemble these things beforehand so that you're not always like getting up, getting other [ __ ] Next, you remove what you don't need. So, I use this device. It's called the brick. And when you tap your phone with that brick, all the distracting apps go away. And whenever you open Instagram, for example, it will show up as blocked. It'll show this black screen. Another thing which I use is called Cold Turkey. It goes on your computer, goes on your browser, and it blocks out all the distracting websites.

[00:17:09]And the last thing I use is called Unhook. It's an extension which goes because I need YouTube. Like the nature of my job requires me to look up stuff on YouTube in order to make the next video, right? So, that's why I use the Unhook extension. It gets rid of all the distracting features of YouTube. For example, the shorts. And finally, and here I had to make a difficult editorial choice. I hope you'll understand.

[00:17:28]There's so much that I can say and I want to say upon the topic of actually focusing and and getting the work done.

[00:17:34]But, I can't do it in this video.

[00:17:35]Because if I did, this video would be like an hour long. I have an entire video which details exact tools and techniques and methods you can use to really focus and get the work done. It's a productivity video. So, please just watch that video after this. It's a longer video for sure. It's about 40 minutes long. So, what's the return on investment here? You spend 40 minutes, take some notes, start taking some actions, and then you can potentially get years ahead of the competition. So, real talk. What I want you to do at the end of this video is just go and watch this video and start taking notes. Cuz this stuff is actually going to change your life if you implement. So, don't bookmark this. Don't put this on watch later. Go ahead and if you have the time right now, just go and watch this video.

[00:18:12]I know it's long, but it will be worth it. So, with that, boys, I'll see you in the next one.