Brad Kearns's video: Episode 243: Predicting The Future Of Health and Fitness And 9 Tips To Transform Your Life in 2021

"Part 2" It’s time for part 2 of this series covering the essential steps you can take to transform all areas of your life in 2021. This episode will pick up where we left off and continue to look into the future of health and fitness, with a focus on workplace and career dynamics, exercising discipline with technology use, and prioritizing your relationships with family and friends. Here are some of the most important takeaways from this show: Evolved Workplace / Career Dynamics: Now more than ever, more and more people are becoming home based workers, have a hybrid of a home-office, or other collaborative workspaces. This may emanate from quarantine but also makes so much sense on basically every practical level. Who wants to waste time sitting in rush hour when you could be actually getting stuff done? One byproduct of the evolved workplace may also be economic repercussions. I think we’ll see a decline in popularity for urban living in favor of focusing on a different quality of life. I’m also noticing, thanks to the Internet, that we have a rapid escalation of progressive culture all over the place, which seems to be spreading from the urban centers in all directions. And with it, an escalation of propgressive values in satellite areas. See this already in Sacramento, Bend, OR, Nashville, St. Louis — I even did a primal talk and potluck dinner (might well have been in Santa Monica!) Technology: Discipline, Restraint, Selectivity, and Pro-Activity: It is incredibly important to apply discipline, restraint, and selectivity to your use of digital technology. It is also time to wake up to the reality that we are getting brainwashed! We’ve seen how targeted content creates divisiveness and confirmation bias. Tristan Harris, co-founder Center for Humane Tech and ex-Google design ethicist explains that the algorithms want to draw you in, and cause you to use technology for a longer time. Yes, very, very smart people have created a stylized experience for you, instead of you being in the driver’s seat. I also did a whole breather show about managing Technology Addiction, which you can listen to here. “I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities,” says Harris, who also was a magician as a kid. He explains that magicians start by looking for blind spots, edges, vulnerabilities and limits of people’s perception, so they can influence what people do without them even realizing it. And this is exactly what product designers do to your mind. They play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention. He presents a gnarly top 10 list I also detailed in a breather show. Briefly, they are: Illusion of free choice (control menu) Intermittent variable rewards (like how slot machines trigger dopamine; they provide a reliable dopamine hit) Creating FOMO (which is actually correlated with metabolic disease) Emphasizing social approval (fundamental human drive “Like”) Social reciprocity (tit for tat) Infinite programming (that insidious need to ‘play the next episode’) Instant interruption: “Maximizing interruptions in the name of business creates a tragedy of the commons, ruining global attention spans and causing billions of unnecessary interruptions each day.” Bundling your reasons with their reasons (the casino registration counter is through the casino floor; if you go to add a friend on Facebook, you’ll get 100 suggestions). Inconvenient choices. If you try to “Cancel” your New York Times subscription, you get a succession of “Are you sure?” Forecasting errors for time spent: “True cost of a click” in time. Medium.com includes the read time (‘7 minute read’) at the top of every article. The ultimate freedom is a free mind, and we need technology that is on our team to help us live, feel, think, and act freely. So what do you do? First, start with building in other rituals and habits that keep you in balance. Check out my morning routine video for ideas, and be sure to spend 35 minutes, minimum, away from your phone. All manner of workouts are a great habit to pick up, as well as hot and cold therapy, massage appointments, meditation sessions, and fun hobbies like drawing, building legos, or even clay sculpture….all you have to do is figure out which activities you find to be the most engaging and fun, and make it a part of your routine. Thanks for listening, and stay tuned for part 3!