Breaking the Cycle of Overthinking

You’ve mastered being productive. You’ve mastered relaxing.
Now it’s time to combine them.
In this episode, I explain how to practice being in a good mood while getting things done, the skill that top performers use to enter flow.

Follow me on my socials:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshterryplays
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joshterryplays/
X: https://x.com/joshterryplays
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@UCOLdtkK1XqV6ikuHUqfetnQ

To work with Josh Terry go to https://apply.joshterryplays.com

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you'd like to get a lot done and be relaxed,
then watch this video. Most people think they can only
get one or the other. This is how you get both.
You're basically struggling with the problem of well, I can
be happy or I can be productive, but you need both.
So people really struggle with this one. They're like, look,

(00:20):
I can get myself into a nice state, I can
float around, I can relax, and then I miss all
of my alarms and I don't turn my material in.
I don't get anything done. Also, I can be really productive.
I know how to get a lot of work done.
I'm a smart, competent individual. But whenever I do that,

(00:41):
I'm incredibly stressed. Life is extremely difficult. I hate my
life and all I want to do is quit. The
people who struggle with this struggle deeply with burnout. It's
a huge issue for them, and the solution is so
straight for that it's easy to miss. The problem is

(01:05):
you've been practicing being happy and not doing anything, and
you've been practicing being unhappy and doing stuff, And the
solution is to practice being happy while doing stuff. And
this is incomprehensible to most people. If you want to

(01:26):
be happier while working on stuff. Then you have to
find a way to drill being in a good mood
and getting something done at the same time, because we
learn things by experiencing them, and these things are skill sets.
Getting stuff done is a skill set, being in a

(01:47):
good mood is a skill set, and good job on
learning both of those skills independently of each other. But
if you want to go to the next level, what
you have to do is put them in the same place.
What that looks like to make this actionable is you

(02:09):
have to be willing to drop your performance a little
bit and drop your happiness level a little bit to
get them in the same place, to feel what they
feel like, and then start increasing it. And the way
you do that is you do a couple of things

(02:31):
that get you in a good mood, and then you
give yourself an assignment that you need to get done,
and then you maintain your mood while getting the thing done.
To maintain your mood while getting the thing done, you
probably have to get the thing done in a less

(02:52):
efficient manner, and also you have to take a little
bit of your focus and put it on the thing.
And so that's why I say that like you to
be willing to let your performance and your happiness level
drop a little bit. But what you're doing is you're
trying to get the happiness metric or the enjoyment or
the flow metric, whatever you want to call it, and

(03:12):
the productivity the performance metric in the same place. And
so you take a little time to get yourself in
a good mood and then okay, you're happy and kind
of floating in whatever. And then you practice working on
something while being happy and floating, and at first it's
going to feel ineffective because you don't know what it

(03:35):
feels like to have your mind on something while it's
also relaxed. Most people have no idea what that feels
like because they know how to lock in and get
their brain on a thing and then drive, and so
they're either relaxed or they're locked in. But you can
do things while relaxed. And so what you have to

(03:57):
do is you have to get yourself relaxed and then
get yourself kind of muddling through a behavior while relaxed.
This is a super elite level skill, by the way,
like what I'm describing now, this is actually like really
top end stuff that like Olympians, top level musicians like

(04:18):
people are the best at the world and stuff. This
is a thing that they practice. This is the skill
set of getting in flow. And so what you need
to do is you need to practice getting your dopamine
up in a healthy way and then giving yourself little
small steps of work while like really letting yourself be

(04:39):
into it, celebrating the wins of it, like keeping yourself
in a good mood, and really hyping yourself up as
you do it to experience what it's like to do
that from a good place. And almost universally, when somebody
does this, their their performance temporarily drop. But what happens

(05:02):
is they then learn a different way to operate. And
it's very well known that in order to integrate a
new skill into a set of skills that you've already developed,
the skill set as a whole has to go down
for you to chunk in this new thing. But then
if you practice all the things together, then your skill
set starts to go up higher than it was before.

(05:23):
And so we know that when a person is in
a more relaxed state of mind, they tend to outperform
somebody who's rigidly stressed and so what you have to
do is you have to practice getting yourself into a
relaxed state of mind and then practice actually acting in
a place of relaxation, acting getting the thing done in
the state that your goal is to be. And so

(05:46):
what people try to do is they try to get
really excellent, assuming that when they get to a certain
level of precision, it will be so easy for them
that they will relax. But what actually happens is they
practice their precision and they ingrain their anxiety, they ingrain
their tension as they go up their skill hierarchy. Because

(06:08):
relaxation itself is a skill, and so what you have
to do is you have to drop your skill, put
relaxation into the equation, and then practice the skill relaxed.
And so this happens in athleticism. When somebody's like practicing
some sort of athletic trick, they have to, like they
first learn the trick, but they learn it rigid and stress.

(06:30):
So they have to learn how to relax their muscles
and do the trick relaxed. When they do that, they
do a terrible job at first, but if they practice
and they keep doing it relaxed, eventually their performance of
the trick relaxed surpasses what it was when they were rigid.
And it's the same with like going into a social

(06:51):
interaction thinking very carefully about your words. If you go
into a social interaction going oh, I'm not going to
think about my words, you're gonna say something really stupid.
But if you do it repeatedly, then the things that
you say over time will actually surpass the things that
you were saying when you were being really careful about
what you said. It's the practice of integrating the skill

(07:15):
of the state that you want to be in into
the performance of what you are doing. If you'd like
to develop a balance of achievement and ease in your life,
then go to apply dot dosh cherryplays dot com or
go to the link below to work with me.