How to Get Back on The Horse When You Have a Really Bad Week
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- How many times have you fallen off the horse,
and then gone into a death spiral
for days or even weeks?
- To reach our full productivity potential,
we have to master the ability
of just getting back on the horse.
(music)
- Hey, guys, it's Demir and Carey
from Lifehack Bootcamp again.
You know, as productivity coaches,
we're always battling these false
but really powerful narratives about productivity.
I would say probably the most harmful one
is that to be productive, we need
to turn ourselves into a robot.
- Yeah, like a cold working machine
operating without any emotions,
going through our day.
What's so harmful about that idea
is that it implies that the answer
to getting more productive is just
to kill off all our emotions
and just become a robot.
But we're not robots, guys.
We're never gonna be robots.
- 'Cause the truth is the complete opposite.
If you wanna become more efficient
and productive, you've gotta get more
emotionally intelligent, especially when
it comes to yourself.
- Yep.
You see, productivity is not divorced
from our emotional state.
In fact, great productivity is the result
of a resilient emotional state.
You might not think about it like that,
but it's true.
- Let's actually take a great example
of this in action, falling off the horse at work.
You know what that means, right?
Falling off the horse in an inherently
emotional circumstances.
Robots, computers, they don't fall off the horse.
They hit an obstacle, and they'll just
keep computing, whether it takes a month
or a minute to solve it.
- Yeah, they don't feel depressed
or overwhelmed or stressed.
They don't ever get angry or fed up
with their circumstances.
- Yeah, but we do, constantly.
We all know what it feels like to be lost
in the middle of your workday.
It's like ya had a plan, but ya can't
remember what it was, and you keep
getting pulled away in other directions.
It's frustrating.
- Yeah, we all know that frustration,
or even the depression when you look
at your priorities and you're just falling
more and more behind instead of moving forward.
- Then we crash.
We can't cope emotionally.
We dissemble, we fall apart, we disconnect.
Some of us are better at hiding it, sure,
but it's still happening under the surface.
- Then we have to reset.
Most of us call this getting back on the horse.
It's a great analogy because it paints
a picture of someone riding a bucking bronco,
and then getting thrown off and having
to get back on.
- Yeah, it makes me wince just thinking about it.
It just seems painful.
Then that gritty man or that gritty woman,
they get up and they dust themselves off,
and they get back on the horse.
- But it's not that simple, right?
If you really got thrown off a horse
and it bruised up 1/2 your body,
everything in your brain would be screaming,
"Do not get back on that horse."
- Because your brain has evolved to do one thing,
and that is keep you alive.
Getting back on that horse requires ya
to override all of your brain's protection mechanisms.
- Yeah, and it's the exact same with your work.
You might need your work and even love your work,
but it hurts you.
It causes stress and heartache.
It makes you feel frustrated and angry.
- Yeah, and your lizard brain, the part
back here, it doesn't realize that
it's necessary to push through this pain,
it just sees the pain.
It starts working overtime to convince you
to run the other way and avoid this pain.
- That is why we go into a spiral
when we fall off the horse.
That's why it's so hard to reset
and get back on the horse, because our brain
thinks you've been hurt.
- But have we actually been hurt?
I mean, are you bleeding?
Are you bruised, have you broke a rib?
No.
Some people face emotional obstacles like this,
and they find them exciting, and they even
find them fun to break through.
- But other people get frustrated and depressed.
So it's a matter of what we tell
our lizard brain.
If our lizard brain thinks we're hurt,
it's gonna make us run the opposite way.
- Yeah, and if it thinks we're on the cusp
of a breakthrough, it's gonna help us
dig deeper and get excited and find reserves
of strength that we never even knew we had.
- So someone asked Tony Robbins one time,
"Do you ever get depressed?"
He said, "Sure, but I don't fall down as often,
"I spend less time on the ground
"and I get back up quicker."
- Yeah, and the Dalai Lama says
we actually add to our pain and suffering
by being overly sensitive and overreacting
to minor things and taking things too personally.
- So how do we short circuit this mechanism?
Here's three tips to reset yourself quickly
and jump back on the horse immediately,
without going into a downward spiral.
- Yeah.
First, when you know you're gonna fall,
actually fall more quickly.
That's right.
Don't try to hold on when the horse,
the ride is getting too crazy.
Sometimes it's better to stop and breathe
and re-approach this ride with a better strategy.
- Yeah, you're not doing yourself any favors
just getting whiplash for days.
It's exhausting.
- Yeah.
- But we do tend to hold on for dear life.
We're terrified of admitting that we're gonna fall.
We say just fall.
- But when you make that decision,
fall on your terms, choosing the right place
and the right time to get that reset.
- Yeah, it's better to step away
during a lunch break and go for a walk
rather than explode on your co-workers
at three o'clock when you finally
can't take it anymore.
- Yeah, and that leads to our second tip.
Learn how to fall without hurting yourself.
Just like a stuntman learns to fall
from a two-story building without hurting himself,
you can learn how to fall off the horse
without hurting yourself.
- Yeah, this is something you can
legitimately get better at.
The better you are at falling,
the less you'll fear it.
And when you stop fearing it,
your lizard brain will stop
working against you so hard.
- All right, so how?
How does a person learn how to fall better?
That's our third tip.
Ya need to have a reset ritual.
- A reset ritual is a preset ritual
that you do when you're feeling overwhelmed.
- Yeah, it helps to have a cheat sheet
to do this, guys.
The good news is we created that cheat sheet for you.
It's called the Overcome Overwhelm Cheat Sheet,
and we're gonna include it here
as a separate link below, so look out for that.
We're gonna go through that in detail here
in a second.
- Then, fourth, get back on the horse quickly.
Every minute you spend negative thinking
threatens to send you into that spiral again.
- So just like Tony Robbins said,
spend as little time on the ground
feeling sorry for yourself as possible
because that's just confirming to your lizard brain
that I am hurt, which means there was harm,
which means I should avoid this.
- There you go, team.
That's your tips to get back on the horse
more quickly and even be excited about
getting back on the horse.
- Now, before we go, I wanna rewind a little bit,
and let's go review that Overcome Overwhelm Cheat Sheet
from tip number three that we're gonna
give you for free today.
- This is your exact step-by-step reset ritual.
Print it out and review it with us
if you know that you need this in your life.
- Now, the first step is simply just acknowledge
the feeling of overwhelm.
Just stop, recognize what you're feeling.
Overwhelm, hopelessness, my heart's rating,
my mind is blank.
Whatever it is, stop and say out loud,
"I'm feeling lost.
"I'm feeling depressed.
"My heart is racing."
- Step number two is actually
to thank the overwhelm.
Yeah, that's right.
It's kinda counterintuitive, but take a moment
and thank that feeling because
what's really happening is your lizard brain
is trying to protect you, so thank it.
- After that, step three is change your state.
Take 20 deep breaths, focus breaths,
and for the first 10 breaths, scan your body
from top to bottom.
Just notice what you're feeling
in every single part of your body.
- Then for each of the last 10 breaths,
name one thing that you're grateful for.
It could be your health, it could be your husband,
it could be your success so far in life
or even that it's just a nice day outside.
- And finally, step number four,
replace that negative internal dialogue
with something extremely positive.
Even if you don't believe it, tell yourself
things like "I am enough, I know exactly
"what to do, I am confident."
- So, listen, team, it's not possible
to stop being emotional.
That's part of who we are.
But we know that you can train yourself
to be more emotionally intelligent and resilient.
That's the key to getting back on the horse.
- See you in the comments.
Let us know how this is working for you.
