Episode 178: Defeating Quick Dopamine and Impatience
Are you tired of losing precious time to your addictive smartphone? In this episode, I delve into how having easy access to quick dopamine impacts our productivity and personal growth. Constant distraction keeps us from investing in what truly matters, whether learning a new skill, writing a book, or achieving any significant goal. Tune in to learn the two crucial strategies to regain control over your time and ensure you start making meaningful progress toward your dreams. We don't want to grow old with regrets about what we wish we would have accomplished!
Topics
The Impact of Social Media and Technology on Personal Growth
Shifting mindset and identity to achieve dreams
Importance of small wins and incremental gains
Understanding and caring for internal fearful and anxious parts
Embracing challenges for long-term growth
Falling in love with incremental gains
Links
👉 Want to dig deeper into what you learned in the podcast? Go to selfgrowthnerds.com/school to work together! 👈
✨🏕️Join Rachel Meltzer and me in Brave New Path, a very intimate retreat, designed for quirky creatives obsessed with self-growth and ready to reignite their spark!🏕️✨
📚 Resources mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
[AUTO-GENERATED]
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:00:06]:
Welcome to the Self growth Nerds podcast. I'm your host Marie, a courage coach, creative soul and adventure seeker. Since thru hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in 2019, I'm on a mission to help you embrace your most confident self so you can achieve your dreams too. If you're eager for deep conversations, big questions and meaningful connections, join me on the quest to discovering how we can create a more magical and memorable life. Hello, nerds. How are you? I'm good. Today, we're talking about defeating 2 of our biggest enemies. If you're someone who wants to accomplish big beautiful things, quick dopamine and impatience are for sure gonna try to get in your way.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:00:57]:
And then at the end of the episode, I'm gonna announce the winner of the reviews contest, who's going to get a free coaching session with me. Their name is on a piece of paper next to me right now, but I'm just going to reveal it at the end. And thank you everyone who participated. Now before we jump in, I want to make an exciting announcement, which is that today, I am opening the doors to my very first in person retreat. It's called Brave New Path and it's gonna take place from October 4th to October 7th, about an hour and a half from Montreal in the Nerds, in the mountains of the eastern townships. It's a really beautiful region and the trees are going to be beautiful. I am hosting this retreat with my friend and colleague, Rachel Meltzer, who's a business and creative coach. We found a really beautiful house in the woods.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:01:57]:
It's got giant windows, beautiful minimalistic design, and space for 9 people. So it's gonna be a very intimate retreat, and it's designed for quirky creatives who feel lost and are in a place where they've been turning in circles and need to figure out their next step. We're gonna help you stop second guessing yourself, make bold decisions about your life, and bring your enthusiasm back to the surface. Many of the people that I talk with, they tell me I I feel numb. I don't know what excites me anymore and this is not the person that I used to be. This breaks my heart and this retreat is for you. In our 4 days together, we're gonna do a series of workshops with 3 goals in mind. The first 1 is that we want to help you get in touch with your true self, with your inner knowing so that you can put your finger on what you really really want deep down, not what others expect of you.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:03:02]:
Now our our second goal is to create a space for you to share your goals with a group of other dreamers who are going to make you feel seen and understood instead of delusional. If you're surrounded by people who don't dream big, it's not going to encourage you to do so because people are just gonna project all of their insecurities onto you. This is why the space that you put yourself in and the people that you surround yourself with are so important. And our Nerds goal is to help you create a flexible plan to move in that direction you've chosen and teach you tools to process your fears so that you don't give up as soon as it gets tough, so that you can follow through even when it doesn't go according to plan. I haven't heard of any retreat quite like that. To be honest, this is the kind of retreat that I would have wanted to go on. And they say if you see a gap in the market, you're meant to be the 1 to fill it. Well, that's what we're doing here.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:04:09]:
Think like Bougie Adult Summer Camp meets artists getaway. You can go on the website to see everything that's included, to see the schedule, to see the price, to see where it's going to take place. The website is Self. Pretty easy. There's only 9 spaces because there's 9 beds. There is 5 private rooms and there is 1 shared room. So if you're interested, go claim your spot now. And I can't wait to meet people in person for the first time to have this intense, intimate experience.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:04:48]:
Our whole mission is to take a group of people who feel like they've been putting everyone else first, who have ideas in their minds, but they just doubt their ability to turn their ideas into reality. They're afraid they're not good enough. They don't know how to get started. They feel overwhelmed. And have those people leave the retreat feeling solid, feeling belief in their idea, feeling clear about what they have to do next, and feeling like they have a group of supportive like minded people who are also heart led, creative visionaries who were keeping themselves small but are just tired and they wanna make sure they're leading a meaningful life that they are in control of. Sometimes we just start flowing down someone else's river and get further and further and further away from ourselves and what we really want. And this place, this retreat, is a time to go, wait, wait, wait, wait. I lost myself somewhere along the way.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:05:57]:
Let me get back behind the wheel. Let me remove the masks, the the the people pleaser mask, and say, no. This is what I want. This is where I'm going. You can come with me if you want, but you don't have to. I I'm going in that direction because this is my life, and I don't wanna get old with regrets. I wanna feel proud. I want to be able to say that I lived fully.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:06:22]:
So if that sounds like something that you need right now, go check out selfgrowthnerds.com/retreat that's it. Alright. Let's talk about quick dopamine and impatience. I got this idea when I was watching a course by David Hyatt, who's, the founder of the Du lectures, this event I went to last summer, in Wales where it's 4 days of talks and workshops for dreamers and doers. He created an online course called Lazy Discipline to to implement a practice of daily writing in your life. And at 1 point he talks about the 2 enemies we've got to defeat if we're gonna show up consistently. And these 2 enemies are quick dopamine and impatience. Let's say you're in an empty room with like a book about carpentry and pieces of wood and a phone.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:07:29]:
You're probably gonna spend time on the phone, but if the phone wasn't there, you'd be like, well, I guess I'm gonna learn carpentry. And I'm gonna build a piece of furniture. And let's say you spend like 2 days in that room. Are you gonna how are you gonna feel at the end of those 2 days if you've spent those 2 days on the phone versus if you've actually learned something new and created a piece of furniture out of what you learned. This is the difference between being a consumer, a passive consumer, or an active creator. And it's becoming increasingly hard to be an active creator because the people who have created those smartphones and all the apps that go in there have designed them to be addictive. The boost of dopamine that we get when we're on these little machines make us addicted like rats to sugar water. It's not our fault, but it is our responsibility.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:08:38]:
Because if we don't consciously decide how we want to use these devices, they will decide for us. If there is a frozen pizza in your freezer and you're tired at the end of a long day, you're gonna be so much more likely to just put that pizza in the oven rather than cook a healthy meal. Just because cooking a meal takes more effort and we are wired as animals to conserve energy. And there's no harm in eating a frozen pizza once in a while, I'm a fan of frozen pizzas. They are lifesavers sometimes. But there's a difference between eating a frozen pizza every now and then and eating 1 every day. If you keep living the way that you've been living, and you fast forward to the end of your life, what's what are you going to see looking back? Are you gonna say something like oh yeah I talked a lot about DIY projects and about all of the furniture that I wanted to to build but I never built anything. Or, yeah, I I spent a lot of time talking about how I wanted to learn Spanish or learn to play the piano, but I never actually took the time.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:09:49]:
Or, yeah, I I had all these ideas for stories I wanted to write, but I never actually put pen to paper or put finger to keyboard. I watched an incredible and infuriating TED Talk the other day by Scott Galloway. There is a slide he showed that slapped me in the face. There was statistics about how much more self harm there is amongst teenagers because they're isolated, because they're comparing themselves to other people on social media, because they are faced with unrealistic expectations. And on that same slide, there was stats about how couples have less and less and less sex because we're on our phones or watching TV, disconnected from ourselves, and therefore disconnected from the people around us. And I also see it in the people that come to me for help. They're feeling unfulfilled because they're disconnected from their core self. If we don't have time to get bored, if we're always distracted with screens, then we have no time to discover what we like to do.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:11:09]:
We don't have the opportunity to follow the crumbs of our curiosity, like I think Liz Gilbert talks about in Big Magic. Think about when you were a kid. When you were bored, that's when you were like, oh, I don't know. Maybe I'm all trying to draw comics. That's what I did. Or maybe I'll go for a bike ride or maybe I'll and that's how you found out what you were interested in. My best ideas come to me when I'm just lying on my bed looking at the ceiling with no distraction whatsoever. And now, not only do we have a significant lack of these moments of stillness, we're also comparing ourselves to a bunch of people on social media.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:11:50]:
And most of the time we're comparing ourselves to people's chapter 10. Let's say you want to get into drawing and you follow a bunch of illustrators who've been doing this for 10 years, then of course you will think your first drawings are ugly. And you're probably going to feel bad about yourself and want to go back to scrolling your phone or play video games or watch Netflix to distract yourself from how ugly your drawings are. Because we expect ourselves to be perfect right away, to be great right away. And if we're not, we shame ourselves. And the shame is just unbearable. So we go back to numbing with screens or food or work or anything that's going to disconnect you from those uncomfortable feelings. And as you listen to this, you might say, I'm guilty.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:12:47]:
I I do this, and I want to change. But there's 2 traps that I see people falling into. The first 1 is expecting willpower to be enough. Expecting that you can just say, okay, I'm gonna stop spending so much time on my phone from now on and that that's going to work. It's not most of the time because there's too many unconscious forces working against you. Like I said earlier, we are wired as animals to seek that dopamine, that easy dopamine. It requires too much energy to to to fight this urge every minute of every day. You need that energy to do all the other things that need to get done in your day to day life.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:13:36]:
Sure, willpower is part of the recipe of change, but you can't rely only on willpower. And the second trap that I see people falling into is beating themselves up when willpower is not enough. To me, this is the equivalent of getting angry at at someone who only has 1 leg for not running fast enough. It's just it goes against their nature. You cannot shame yourself into change. You cannot whip yourself into better habits. You are not helping your situation if you, let's say you spend 2 hours on your phone and then tell Self, so annoyed with myself. I I said I was gonna stop doing this.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:14:24]:
I shouldn't be doing this. Kind of like, the elf in Harry Potter. What's what's the name? Dobby hitting its head against the wall. It's not going to be helpful. What needs to happen instead, and this is what I'm going to talk about in this episode, is 1, a shift in your identity, in your values, in your belief system, and a shift in your relationship with yourself. We are in need of an internal revolution of what matters most to us and how we treat ourselves. First things first, I suggest doing a reality check on your values and your belief system. So there's what you say you value, and there's what we can observe you actually value from the actions that you take or don't take.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:15:17]:
I see this. I used to see this a lot on dating apps. People will write will write things on their profiles like, I value meaningful friendships. Do you really? Can we see that in the actions that you take? Do you make the effort and take the time to take care of your friendships? Or is this just a concept that you like that sounds good, but that doesn't translate in your day to day behavior. If I was to ask you, what do you value most between consumption or creation? Most of you will say you value creation most, but oftentimes, it's not going to translate to your day to day life because it's harder. And we want things to be easy. We tend to be impatient. We tend to want things to work right away.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:16:08]:
We don't like feeling uncomfortable. We don't like being a beginner at something. We don't wanna be judged. We don't wanna seem incompetent. And this intolerance to discomfort makes our lives so much smaller than they could be. Let me give you an example. I met a woman recently who had been nursing an idea for a business for a long time. And when I asked her why she had not taken action on it yet, she said I'm just terrified that I'm gonna make mistakes, that it's going to fail, and I'm going to feel embarrassed.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:16:48]:
And I was telling her, yeah, you will make mistakes. And you will, quote unquote, fail, but what does failure mean? It just means things don't go according to your expectations. Then you learn from your failure, you get up again, and you try something else, something better. In the course that I was watching with David Hayat, the lazy discipline course, He he was talking about how he met the founder of Patagonia, the outdoor clothing brand, a few years ago. His name is Yvon Chouinard, and he asked him for advice. And you know what that that man said? He's he's really old now. He Self, 40 years of hard work. That's it.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:17:33]:
There's no shortcuts, and there's no quick fixes. That is something that I had to learn when I was through hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Sometimes I was so tired of hiking, but I had to to to to remind myself, you know what? All I have to do is keep putting 1 step in front of the other. There's no shortcut. If I wanna do this thing, I just need to keep going. And it makes me think about what 1 of my clients text me a few days ago. She's writing a book, and she texts me. I just realized that if I keep writing every day, eventually I will be done.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:18:10]:
And that is true, but most of the time she doesn't really feel like it. It feels hard, but that is the whole point I want to make here is we need a shift in identity where we become someone who values doing hard things. Someone who instead of running away from hard can find a way to embrace hard. Someone who knows that if you choose short term pain, you will get long term gain. Think about the example I gave you at the at the start of this episode, where if you're in a room with a phone or books about carpentry and pieces of wood, it will take a lot more effort to build the piece of furniture than it would to look at the phone, but the gain is so much more valuable at the end. The time that you have spent learning the skill is is not time that was wasted on your phone, but time that was invested in something that will be useful moving forward. And of course I'm just using carpentry as a random example, just replace this with anything that you would like to learn. Short term pain equals long term gain and then you can flip that short term gain equals long term pain.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:19:32]:
Take the example of the frozen pizza. If you choose to eat the frozen pizza every night, it's not gonna be great for your health on a long term basis. Something that, David said in the course that I thought was brilliant is the only way to keep doing something hard, whether it's writing your book, working hard in your business, through hiking, recording a podcast every week for more than 3 years, is to, quote, fall in love with incremental gain. To fall in love with small steps. So many of us are impatient. We want to be up there already. We wanna be great at it already. That's just not possible.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:20:17]:
You've got to be able to celebrate the small wins. What helps me the most when I'm going through a challenging time in my business is telling myself I'm in it for the long game. It helps me zoom out and see this period that I'm in, this challenging chapter that I'm in as just like a part of a much longer journey. It helps me put problems in perspective because I think, oh, okay, well, in 10 years, I'll be way past that. I'll be like, this this was nothing. This helped me become the person I am today. So what I have been doing here is sharing a series of beliefs that I had to implement in my way of thinking in order to shift my identity. And that's what I am inviting you to do as well if you want to be more active in your life.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:21:19]:
Identity comes first. What's happening between your 2 ears comes first. In order to live a different life, to create a life that you love, you first need to become the kind of person who thinks in such a way that allows them to do what's necessary to bring the results you want into your life. Now, I'm aware that sounded super abstract, so I'm gonna give you a simple example. Let's say you want to have written a book. The action you will need to take is to sit down many many many many many times and write. But in order to do this, you first need to be the kind of person who thinks it's okay to write a shitty paragraph. It's okay if it doesn't sound good at first.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:22:10]:
It's okay that I think my characters are kinda cringe. It's okay that that my writing doesn't sound like my favorite author. The thoughts you believe come first because they will determine whether you show up and take the action or not. If every time you try to sit down and write, your inner critic is really mean to you and says that no 1 will ever wanna read this crap, then you will stop sitting down and writing. That's why the shift in identity is so important. So you can start thinking thoughts that are gonna serve you in creating what you want to create. You can work backwards. Think about your dream life.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:22:59]:
Now what are the boring basics that need to be done every day or every week or every month for you to get closer to that dream life? What are the priorities and habits of the person you need to become in order to make that a reality? And finally, how does that person think? What did they believe that allows them to prioritize these things, to to implement these habits, to to do what they have to do to create that life. How do they think? Now notice that I said the person you need to become. It's not who you are right now, it's not who you have been, it's who you can become. And many of you have a fixed mindset without being aware of it. You think the way you are right now is the way you will always be. You have thoughts like I'm always late, I can never finish what I start, I'm not a perseverant person, I'm not good with money, I'm very perfectionistic. Basically, you take habits that you have observed within yourself and you turn them into a character trait as if it's set in stone. I did not consider myself a perseverant person before I thruhiked the Pacific Crest Trail.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:24:18]:
I thought I had very little stamina and I worried about being able to make it through. I became perseverant. Be mindful of the stories you keep telling yourself. A lot of the time it's stories that you have heard growing up. Your self talk might sound a lot like how your mom spoke to herself, for example, or how your dad spoke to you. Open yourself up to the idea that you might just blow your own mind, that you might surprise yourself. Neuroplasticity exists. You can rewire your brain.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:25:01]:
And I mean, you won't completely change. I'm still the, like, clumsy, whimsical person that I always was, but I have learned to be perseverant. I have learned to have discipline. I have learned to figure things out financially that were super confusing to me. There is so much growth available to you if you stay open, if you stay curious, if you reach out for help, if you're patient with yourself, if you're kind with yourself, I'm gonna get there to the kindness because it's the second ingredient and it's essential. But first, I wanna tell you the sentence that I love that has helped me shift aspects of my identity. And it's, I am someone who complete the sentence. I am someone who walks every day.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:25:57]:
That's just who I am. I am someone who writes every day. I am someone who leaves their phone in the kitchen at night. I'm an alarm clock kinda person. I am someone who doesn't waste money on stuff that they don't need. I'm someone who checks their finances every month. I'm someone who invests in their growth, who prioritizes their growth. You get to decide today who you want to be.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:26:28]:
I remember like taking a walk, I've told you this before if if you're like a regular listener of the podcast. The year I decided I wanted to make a 100 k in my business, I was taking my walk by the canal thinking I am someone who makes a 100 k just to get used to it. Just so that I could see myself as this kind of person so that when I started taking the necessary actions, it wouldn't seem so alienating. It wouldn't seem so strange. The first time I started doing this work is when I was preparing for the Pacific Crest Trail, when I had just discovered coaching. I would go everywhere walking. Well, not everywhere, but as much as possible. If a friend in invited me over, I would go there by foot.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:27:13]:
I would think I'm someone who just walks everywhere because I'm a throughhiker, and that's what throughhikers do. You've got to to practice thinking this sentence, just like you would break new hiking boots in. Before it feels like your new normal, you've got to to walk in it. You've got to walk around thinking the sentence. You can write it down on Podcast it notes. You can record yourself saying it and then listen to it. I don't care what you do, but it needs to be with you on a regular basis. You can't just write it down in your journal once.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:27:51]:
And make sure you don't fill in the sentence with something that your brain is gonna have a really hard time believing. Start small like I am someone who makes their bed. Instead of I am someone who always keeps their whole house clean. You wanna make it easy to get small wins because small win wins? Wins? Are going to be what creates momentum. If you struggle with spending money, let's say with spending a lot of money online and you want to be able to save more, maybe you start with I am someone who saves $10 a week, and then show yourself that you can do that. And don't aim for a perfect streak. Just aim for incremental gain. 1% improvements.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:28:41]:
I hear so many of you think, yeah. Well, you know, if I start this, I will probably give up after AAA short while, just like New Year resolutions. And when people tell me that, when they talk about, like, their future self, how their future self is gonna let them down, I find it funny because it's like they're talking about someone else, like they have no power over themselves. And it's true in a way. There are parts of you who take over. Fearful, anxious parts that want to self sabotage your efforts to change because it's just easier to stay the same, it's safer to stay the same. And what I do with my clients is help them get to know these parts of them that take over and help them step into the shoes of their own leader again. You might be in a place where you really need to rebuild your relationship with Self, to rebuild your self respect and your self trust so that you know when you say I'm gonna do x, y, and z that you will actually do it most of the time.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:29:56]:
If it's not the case right now, that's okay. You're not broken. It's just that there are parts of you that you don't quite know well enough yet. You don't know how to take care of them in a way that makes them feel secure enough to let you remain in control. That is the work that I do with my clients. And if you wanna hear more about it, there's a podcast episode about this 152, become a clear, calm, and confident inner leader. Improving your relationship to all these parts of you is crucial if you wanna change your life, if you wanna do hard things, if you wanna try new things. Otherwise, the journey is going to be unbearable because as soon as you're gonna step outside your comfort zone and do something you're not used to, the fearful, anxious parts of you are going to freak out.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:30:54]:
And what most people do is yell at these parts of themselves. So yell at themselves, being beat themselves up or try to repress these parts of themselves, which doesn't fix anything, it just creates more internal conflict, internal chaos. I would compare this to going on vacation with a bunch of kids. If you stay home with your kids and you you're settled in a routine, it's much easier than if you go on vacation and you're trying a bunch of new things every day. Right? Your kids are gonna need a lot more reassurance from you as their parent. This is the same. If you want a bigger, bolder life, you're going to need to get really good at taking care of those internal children that get just get scared when there's a risk of being rejected, of being judged. It just makes so much sense.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:31:55]:
You've got to have compassion with yourself and learn how to take care of yourself outside your comfort zone. I teach tools for you to do exactly that. So if you're curious to learn more, book a free assessment call with me atselfgirlnerds.com/school, and we're gonna see if we're a good fit. Now let's circle back to the theme of this episode, which was quick dopamine and impatience. The 2 enemies that we want to defeat. And I say defeat, but really I should say make friends with. Because I just don't want quick dopamine and impatience to make decisions for you. Sure, like, I scroll my phone too.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:32:41]:
I love a good Netflix binge watch like anyone else. But I try as much as possible to remain in charge, to choose my moments and make sure it doesn't take over my life and it doesn't take me away from what matters most to me. We just wanna flip the power dynamic. And I know it's easier said than done, but I don't wanna give you hacks because what works for me might not work for you. So I wanna give you questions you can ask yourself instead. How can you make it easier for you to become the person you want to be? What would help you become this person? And how can you ensure that you're not relying on the willpower only in order to make these changes. And instead of jumping straight to, I don't know, but I don't know. I don't know.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:33:41]:
Just sit in the silence. Sit in the stillness. Hang out with the questions. There is so much more wisdom in you than you think if you're willing to listen instead of looking to others for advice. Okay, now it's time to announce the winner of the reviews contest. Drumroll. That was a very crappy drumroll, we're gonna roll with it. The winner is Cecile Pozzi.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:34:11]:
Your name sounds French, which is good because I speak French. You can message me on Instagram at self gold Nerds to claim your free coaching session, and I cannot wait to meet you. Congratulations. And a reminder for everyone that the retreat Brave New Path is open right now. There's only 9 spots. So if you wanna meet in person, if you're a self growth nerd who loves the outdoors, who has a little fancy side as Self, because we're gonna be in a super modern high end chalet, then this is perfect for you. Go check it out at selfgrowthnerds.com/retreat. Okay.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:34:51]:
That's it for this week. I'm sending you lots of love, my friends. Talk to you soon. Bye. If you love what you're hearing on the Self growth nerds podcast and you want individual help finding a new direction for your life and developing the courage to make your dreams a reality, you have to check out how we can work together on selfgrowthnerds.com Nerds message me on Instagram at self growth nerds. My clients say they would have needed that support years ago. So if you're tired of feeling like you're wasting your life, don't wait. Get in touch now, and I cannot wait to meet you.