5 Habits to Think Clearly When You Feel Overwhelmed

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That's Nutrafol.com spelled N-U-T-R-A-F-O-L dot com, promo code ONPURPOSE for $15 off. And remember, using the code supports the show. Hey, it's Jay. I don't know what your day's been like, but I was just thinking about you for a minute. And I hope you're being a little patient with yourself, because you deserve it. And yeah, I'll talk to you soon. Nutrafol Women One of the strangest things about the way we live now, is that you can spend an entire day learning and end it without being able to explain a single thing you just learned. Imagine this. You listen to a podcast while you're driving. You watch an expert explain something while you make dinner. You save a video because it completely changes the way you think about your relationships, your money, or health, and then you forget you saved it and never return to it again. So where did the idea go? We have easier access to brilliant people, research, advice, and information, than any generation before us. But access to other people's thinking doesn't automatically make us better thinkers or doers. You can hear intelligent ideas for hours, agree with all of them, and retain or put into practice almost none of them. And I think that explains why so many of us feel as though our brains need a reset. We're constantly giving our minds more to watch, more to read, more to hear, but rarely asking them to remember something, question it, connect it to our lives, and then we're able to do it again. Or come up with an idea of our own. There's so much scrolling, stimulation, and external input that we can end the day feeling mentally exhausted without feeling any more curious. So today, I want to share five slightly strange habits that make your brain participate again. They'll help you remember more of what you consume, think more critically about what you believe, generate more ideas of your own, and hopefully begin replacing some of that feeling of brain rot, with genuine curiosity. These are not five things you need to add to an already crowded morning routine. Each habit actually solves a different problem. One helps you pay attention before you learn. One helps information stay with you afterward. One tests what you believe. One changes your relationship with not knowing. And one gives an unfinished thought enough room to fully develop. None of this is about proving how smart you are. And honestly, some of these may make you feel less smart for a few minutes. That's part of the reason they're so important. So let's get right into it with habit number one. Guess before you Google. Or guess before you AI. We have become almost allergic to the 10 seconds between having a question and receiving an answer. Somebody at dinner asks, why do we say that? Or when did that happen? And four people reach for their phones before anyone has the chance to wonder or think about it. The answer is sitting on the table. Before you search for an answer, take 10 seconds to guess. Even around the table. Ask everyone to guess. Make it a game. Make it fun. Ask yourself, what do I think the answer is and why? You don't need to be confident or even close to correct. You're simply giving yourself something to compare with the answer you're about to learn. Learning researchers Lindsay Richland and Nate Cornell demonstrated this by asking people to learn about how vision works. One group simply read the material. Another group was given a quiz. Because they hadn't learned the information yet, they got most of the answers wrong. Then both groups read the same material. When they were tested afterward, the people who had taken the quiz first remembered more of the information they had been asked about. Attempting those questions, even unsuccessfully, had made them pay more attention when the correct answers appeared. Researchers call this the pre-testing effect. You can use this before almost anything you want to understand. Read the title of an article and predict its main argument. Before somebody shows you how to use something, guess how you think it works. Before you read about a historical event, ask what you believe caused it. Then compare. Where did the explanation agree with you? What did you overlook? Which assumption sent you in the wrong direction? You're no longer simply receiving information. You're noticing the difference between the model in your mind and what you've learned. And a wrong guess can show you something the correct answer cannot. It shows you how you were thinking. Maybe you assumed two things were connected when they were not. Maybe you've relied on an example that was unusually memorable but not representative. Maybe you had the right basic idea and missed one important piece of context. That's all worth seeing. Of course, use this where guessing is safe and the answer can be checked. Don't improvise medical advice, guess your way through somebody's safety instructions or become so attached to your predictions that you dismiss reliable evidence. This habit has two parts. Make a real guess and then become willing to let it go. That second part can be surprisingly difficult. Watch what happens the next time you're wrong. Do you become curious? Or do you start negotiating? Do you say, well, that's basically what I meant. I would have gotten to it if the question were phrased differently. Or do you say, like, that was my second answer. We can become remarkably creative when trying to remain correct. Try staying with the cleanest sentence. I thought it was this, but it wasn't. What did I miss? There's nothing humiliating about updating an answer after receiving new information. That's the entire point of asking the question. You can even turn this into a simple dinner habit. The next time somebody asks a question that sends everyone toward their phones, tell them to wait 60 seconds. Let everyone make a guess and explain how they got there. Then look it up together. We're all craving more curiosity and allowing more openness for curiosity and allowing more openness for curiosity without judgment is amazing for your brain. This episode of On Purpose is presented by Amazon. You might not know this about me, but I'm a huge Christmas person. Huge. There's no such thing as too soon to put on my holiday playlist, pick up a tree, and start gift shopping. All of these little festive traditions bring me so much joy, so why not start early? And Amazon gets it, which is why you'll find low prices right now. Get a head start on holiday gifting with Amazon's low prices. Shop now at amazon.com forward slash holiday. The next habit begins at the other end of learning. You have found the answer, what's the video, or finish the chapter. Now we need to find out whether any of it stayed in your mind. Habit number two is explain it before you look again. After you finish a podcast, video, article, chapter, or conversation, pause before you replay it or check your notes. Ask yourself, what was the main idea? Why did it make sense? How would I explain it to someone else? This will feel harder than listening or reading it again. When the information is still in front of you, everything feels familiar. You recognize the words and examples, so you assume you understand them. Trying to explain the idea without looking reveals what you can actually remember and where your understanding falls short. Psychologists Henry Rodiger and Jeffrey Karpicki demonstrated this by asking people to study the same written material in different ways. One group re-read it several times. Another group spent some of that time putting the material away and trying to recall what they had learned. When they were tested five minutes later, the people who had repeatedly studied performed better. But when the test happened two days or one week later, the result reversed. The people who had practiced recalling the information remembered more. What makes this even more interesting is that the re-readers felt more confident. Seeing the same information repeatedly made it feel familiar, but that confidence didn't translate into stronger memory over time. What makes this even more interesting is that the re-readers felt more confident in the same way. What makes this even more interesting Trying to recall the information was more difficult in the moment, but it helped the learning last. To build real knowledge instead of simple familiarity, try a three-step method. Recall, explain, repair. First, close the source and recall whatever you can. Do not immediately panic about getting every detail. Start with the main idea. Second, explain it in ordinary language as though you were telling one person who had not heard it. Third, reopen the source and repair the gaps. What did you distort, skip, or fail to connect? Suppose you have just listened to an interview about boundaries. Instead of saving the episode and moving on, pause and say, the idea I want to remember is this. The reason it matters to me is this. One situation where I could use it is this. And this is what's so beautiful. You could share it with a friend, talk about it, make it a point to bond upon. If the explanation falls apart after the first sentence, return to the specific section you did not understand or remember clearly. You now know what needs another look. There's a related phenomenon called the illusion of explanatory depth. Researchers Leonard Rosenblatt and Frank Keel asked people to rate how well they understood familiar objects, and then asked them to explain how those objects worked in detail. When people attempted the explanation, they discovered gaps they had not noticed. Think about something as ordinary as a zipper or a sink. You've used it dozens of times. Could you explain how it works? We often know what something does long before we understand how it does it. You can see this in conversations too. Somebody says, the algorithm rewards engagement, and everybody nods. What does that actually mean? Which engagement? How is it measured? Compared with what? Sometimes we repeat a phrase because it has become familiar enough to feel self-explanatory. When somebody explains a process to you, try saying, can I tell that back? to make sure I understand. Then give them your version. You're not asking them to repeat the entire explanation, and you're not pretending you followed a section you lost. You're showing them which part made sense and giving them the chance to correct the rest. Your explanation will probably be messier than the one you heard. You may use the wrong word, circle back, and realize you skipped the step connecting the beginning to the end. Good. The gap you can hear is the gap you can feel. The smooth nod you gave while listening told you very little. Keep this small. You do not need to deliver a lecture after every chapter or turn every podcast into homework. Choose one idea worth keeping. Record a 60-second voice note, write three sentences, or explain it to a friend later that day. If you want to remember it longer, try again a few days later before returning to your notes. That gives us a much more honest test of learning. Can I bring the idea back when nobody else is holding it in front of me? But now we arrive at an even more uncomfortable possibility. What if you remember the idea perfectly and have never seriously asked whether it's true? Habit number three is make the strongest case against yourself. Most of us are very good at collecting evidence for what we already believe. We find an article, friend, comment, or personal story to back ourselves up, or we find the worst possible example from the other side. By the end, we feel even more certain of our own position than when we began. So if you want to challenge your brain, choose an opinion or decision of yours, and ask, if an intelligent person disagreed with me, what would they say? The word intelligent is key. You're not searching for the easiest argument to defeat. You're trying to build the version that would make a thoughtful person on the other side say, yeah, that's a fair account of what I believe. Imagine you believe your team should cancel its weekly meeting because it wastes time. Your evidence arrives quickly. People repeat updates, the conversation drifts, and you could use the hour to work. Now make a serious case for keeping some version of it. Maybe newer people receive context they do not get elsewhere. Maybe a quick conversation prevents confusion later. Maybe the problem is the format, frequency, or number of people attending rather than the existence of the meeting. Your view might evolve from this meeting's pointless to updates should be shared beforehand and we should use 20 minutes for unresolved questions. You have not abandoned your opinion. You've made it more precise, actionable, and you now have a proposal that accounts for a better future situation. In two experiments, researchers Charles Lord, Mark Leper, and Elizabeth Preston found that asking people to consider the opposite possibility reduced certain biases more effectively than simply telling them to be fair and unbiased. I find that distinction useful. Open-minded sounds admirable, but it does not tell you what to do. Build the strongest explanation for the other possibility gives your mind a tangible task. There are three questions I want you to use here. What is the strongest case against my position? What evidence would change my mind? And which part of my current view might be too broad? That second question, what would change my mind, shows you whether you're still investigating or simply guarding a conclusion. If no fact, result, or experience could possibly move you, your opinion may have become tied to your identity. Once that happens, changing your mind can feel less like learning. This episode is brought to you by Bioptimizers. People often ask how I keep up with my busy schedule. It all starts with getting good sleep. That's why my doctor recommended Magnesium Breakthrough from Bioptimizers. Magnesium is responsible for over 300 essential functions in the body, and most of the time, it's the body that's responsible for the most essential functions only give you one or two forms of it. This one has seven, including Glycinate, the go-to form for sleep, plus Malate and Taurate, tied to energy production and heart function. 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That's Indeed.com forward slash podcast and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed here. Terms and conditions apply. Need the right hire fast? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. And more like losing. But changing your mind does not have to mean performing a huge public reversal. In fact, I wish we heard this sentence more often. That change is part of how I see it. You can keep the overall view and admit that one claim no longer holds up. You can become less certain. You can make your argument smaller and more accurate. Start with something low stakes. Consider whether a familiar routine still works, whether a proposal has a weakness you have ignored, or why another person wants to approach a trip differently. The friend who wants an idea that you don't want to hear is the one who wants to hear it. If you don't want to hear it, may have value using limited time. Well, the friend who wants flexibility may value discovering things together. Understanding the value underneath their preference gives you more to work with than deciding that one person is controlling and the other is careless. Clear thinking includes knowing when you have enough information to act. Give the alternative a fair hearing. Notice whether it changes anything and then decide what follows. Sometimes you will leave with a different opinion. Sometimes you will leave with the same opinion, only now it's more grounded. The key here is to be okay with occasionally being wrong. In fact, you're inviting it. To me, that's a trait I've witnessed in all of the most intelligent people I've ever met. This takes me to habit number four, which is become a beginner somewhere you're not impressive. Think about the first few weeks at a new job. Everyone's using acronyms you've never heard, referring to meetings you were not in, and working within systems. Nobody is properly explained. Someone asks whether you know how to do something. And instead of saying, not yet, can you show me? You say, yeah, I think I've got it. Then you spend an hour trying to figure it out alone because asking after you've already nodded somehow feels even more embarrassing. We want the people who hired us to believe they made the right decision. So we try to look like quick learners. But sometimes that performance gets in the way of actually learning. You avoid the basic question because it might reveal a gap. follow the wrong process because asking for help feels exposing. You nod at the unfamiliar term and promise yourself you'll Google it later. Now your attention is split between understanding the job and managing how you appear while you're learning it. And the longer you hide what you don't know, the harder it becomes to ask. This is a natural human instinct, but we can get better at catching ourselves when we do it. To practice this improvement, choose something outside the area where you usually know what you're doing. It could be drawing, gardening, learning a language, playing an instrument, repairing something, or understanding a subject you've never studied. You do not need the most difficult or unusual hobby. You just need a genuine opportunity to attempt something new, receive useful feedback, and try it again. And choose a small enough first task that the feedback can be specific. I want to be good at drawing is so broad that every imperfect sketch can make you wonder whether you have any talent at all. Learning to observe and sketch one object gives somebody something concrete to help you improve. I need to master Spanish can make your first sentence feel ridiculous. Practicing one short exchange allows you to hear what changed between the first attempt and the fifth. Look, we do not have to pretend every hobby magically transforms your brain or personality. Learning three chords will mostly make you better at playing three chords. But while you're learning them, you get to watch your relationship with correction. Can somebody tell you that your hand is in the wrong position without you hearing a verdict on your intelligence? Can you ask them to show you again? Can you repeat the slow version when part of you wants to skip ahead and look more advanced? It's a practice not only in correction, but also in humility, a key trait to have when being open to learning more. Humility is a useful thing to practice anywhere. So much learning is delayed because we do not want to be seen during the period when we're still learning. We want to return with the finished skill and surprise everyone. We want the before and after without letting anyone witness the middle. Try removing the long introduction before a basic question. You know the one, I'm sure I should know this and I think I basically understand it and obviously I've worked with something similar before, but all of that is an attempt to prove how much you know before revealing what you don't know. Ask the easy version. What does that word mean? Can you show me the first step again? Why did you make that choice? Usually the clearer question gets you a better answer. It also gives the other person permission to explain the foundation rather than guessing which parts you're pretending to understand. The practical habit here is simple. Keep a short list of things you don't understand. It could be an acronym at a new job, a technique in a class, a step in a recipe, or an idea in a book. Then ask one clear question. Can you show me an example? Or can I repeat that back to make sure I understood? Ask while your attempt is still rough. When correcting your direction is much easier than starting over after hours of pretending you are certain. If you notice that you're consuming endlessly about the skill without attempting it, make the next step physical. Watching a lesson can prepare you, but at some point you need to get your hands dirty. Information becomes much more useful once you have a real attempt to connect it to. And remember the feeling of being new the next time you're the expert in the room. Are you explaining the basic context or assuming everyone knows the language because you have known it for years? Think about the step you need somebody to show you twice. Being a beginner again can make you much more patient with the person who has not caught up to you yet. When was the last time you let yourself be bad at something long enough to learn it? If it has been a while, choose one small attempt this week. One lesson, recipe, sketch, repair, or song. Give yourself a place where I don't know you. A place where you don't know how yet is an accurate description of where you are. This episode is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve. Travel is one of life's greatest privileges and Sapphire Reserve makes every moment across every corner of the world more memorable. You can earn three times the points on dining, a $300 dining credit, and access to reserve exclusive tables. Plus, enjoy access to award-winning airport lounges for two guests and a $500 credit for a free meal. And a $500 credit for the edit to use towards a collection of the world's best hotels. Learn more at chase.com forward slash sapphire reserve. Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank, NA member FDIC, subject to credit approval, terms apply. The final habit is for a different kind of mental block. The moments when you have plenty of information but still need a few ideas of your own. Habit number five is take your problems for a walk. When we feel stuck, our first response is often to add more information. We search for advice, look up forums, or open new articles. That can help when we're missing facts, but sometimes we have plenty of information and still don't know what we want to do with it. The next time you need ideas, write down one clear question and take it on a 10 or 20 minute walk without headphones. Maybe you're wondering how to begin a difficult conversation, make a work presentation more engaging, celebrate someone in a person, or approach a creative project. Don't pressure yourself to find the perfect answer. Just see how many possible answers you can generate. Stanford researchers Marilee Apezzo and Daniel Schwartz studied the connection between walking and creative thinking across four experiments. In one task, participants were asked to think of unusual uses for ordinary objects. Walking improved this kind of creative thinking for 80% of the time. Interestingly, walking was much less helpful on a task that required one correct answer. It appeared to be most useful when people needed to generate multiple possibilities. That gives us a practical way to use this research. If you need a fact, look it up. If you need possibilities, try walking first. When you return, write down whatever ideas occurred to you, even if some of them seem unrealistic. You can evaluate researches and refine those ideas afterward. You can make this even easier by dividing the walk into two parts. For the first half, stay completely open. Let yourself generate obvious ideas, impractical ideas, and ideas you'll probably reject. During the second half, notice which two or three ideas you keep returning to and what they'd require. When you get home, write them down under three headings. The idea, what appeals to me about it, and what I still need to check. This separation, is important because generating and judging ideas at the same time can shut the process down quickly. How many times have you overcome it with an idea but then debated yourself out of it, negotiated with yourself, rejected it and told yourself it's a bad idea? That blocks your creative thinking. So giving yourself that freedom and creating judgment and ideation as separate tasks allows you to win. You think of an option, immediately list five reasons it will fail, and return home convinced you had no ideas. Give yourself a few minutes to create possibilities before asking them to survive reality. The evaluation still happens. It simply happens after you have something to evaluate. And if you spend the entire walk forcing the same thought and getting nowhere, let the problem go for a while. Researchers call this incubation. You work on something, step away and return later. Researchers have found that these breaks can help with certain creative problems. Sometimes the useful shift happens after you've done something. After you stop demanding an immediate answer from your mind. So as you take your walk, let your key question move in and out of your attention. If you return with no breakthrough, that's fine. You gave the question room. Sometimes that room produces an idea. Sometimes it shows you that you need more information. And sometimes you simply return with a less crowded mind and recognize which part of the problem actually matters. A thought does not become wise just because it arrived during a walk, but at least you have brought something of your own back to the table. Now research and conversation can meet your thinking instead of replacing it before it begins. And now it's time for a new segment, Joy Delivered, brought to you by Amazon. The best gifts come from noticing the little things about the people we love, the hobbies they lose hours to, the passions they light up talking about, the things that make them truly happy. And Amazon makes it easy to find something that speaks to exactly who they are. I think one of the most meaningful things we can do for the people we love is really pay attention to them. Because it's so easy to assume that what makes us happy will make someone else happy. We think, oh, I would love this, so they'll love this too. But real thoughtfulness is taking the time to understand what brings them joy. And sometimes that means asking better questions. What are they excited about right now? What have they been wanting to try? What's something they can talk about for hours? I think the best gifts often come from those little conversations, the things someone mentions once that you actually remember. Maybe they've discovered a new hobby. Maybe they're passionate about something you know nothing about. Or there's something they've always wanted to learn. When you choose something that speaks specifically to that, you're showing them that you're listening. And ultimately, that's what makes a gift meaningful. It's not just the gift itself, it's the feeling behind it. It's saying, I see you. I know what matters to you. And I wanted to do something that would make, you happy. To me, that's how you really deliver joy. Amazon is here to help you deliver joy this holiday season with gifts for everyone on your list. Let's return to the question posed from the beginning. What is one idea from this podcast episode that you could now explain to somebody else? Put it in your own words. Maybe you'd say that attempting an answer before learning can help prepare your attention. Maybe you'd explain that remembering is something you practice, not merely a result you check. Maybe you'd say that a good test of an opinion is whether you can explain the strongest argument against it. Maybe you would talk about asking the basic question at a new job or taking a creative problem on a walk before consuming more advice. The five habits are simple. You do not need to turn all five into a complicated new routine. Choose the one that you think is the best. If information keeps passing through you, practice recall. If you feel extremely certain, consider the strongest alternative. If you've been watching other people do something you want to learn, make one beginner attempt. If your mind feels crowded with everyone else's answers, take your question outside before adding another voice. Maybe the next time you hear a phrase you don't understand, you ask what it means instead of nodding. Maybe you close an article and discuss it. Maybe you ask what it means instead of nodding. Maybe you close an article and discover which section you need to revisit. Maybe you leave a conversation with a more nuanced view or finally make the first awkward attempt at something you've only watched other people do. Those moments may look less impressive than having an immediate answer. They involve pauses, mistakes, corrections, and questions that remain open longer than you would like, but they give you the chance to become more capable than you were before the question appeared. I hope you leave this episode more willing to say, I don't know yet. You can guess, you can leave the door open, you can ask, you can try, get corrected, and try again. We don't need more information passing through us at twice the speed. We just need more moments when we stop, pay attention, and allow an idea to change the way we think. Thank you so much for listening to today. I hope you'll pass this on to a friend and share what you've learned. Remember, I'm always in your corner and I'm forever rooting for you. Take care and I'll see you next time. Finished your essay a day early? That deserves a. Finally folded that laundry? That deserves a. Parallel parked on the first try? That deserves a. No matter what you accomplish today, celebrate with an ice-cold Coca-Cola, because even the little wins deserve a big. Enjoy Coca-Cola. Holiday drinks are now at McDonald's. Like the new Red Bull Frosted Cranberry Energizer. It's Red Bull meets cranberry flavors, topped with cold foam and sprinkles, made to charge your holiday spirit. Now at McDonald's. 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