Dr. Matt Jones — Neuroscience Confirms - Why Doing Less Helps You Achieve More

Source: YouTube Channel: Dr. Matt Jones (66500 subs) Duration: 15:06 Views: 211449 · Likes: 13256 Video: Watch on YouTube

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Most people’s first move when they feel stuck is to add more. More habits, more goals, more systems. This video makes the case for the opposite.

The research is clear: too many open goals running in parallel drain your cognitive resources constantly, not just when you’re working on them, but all the time. And when goals compete for the same limited attention and energy, performance on all of them drops. The people who actually execute well over time tend to have fewer priorities, not more.

In this video I cover:

• Why your brain keeps running unfinished goals in the background, and what that costs you cognitively
• What the research shows about competing goals and performance
• Why adding things feels like progress but often works against you
• How to audit what you’re actually doing versus what’s moving the needle
• What execution actually looks like in practice, and why it’s simpler than most people think

Research: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21688924/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27101340/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19450006/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19450006/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7894921/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7234802/

TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Why Adding Backfires 02:22 Brain Background Apps 04:46 Competing Goals Trap 06:01 Doing Less Is Not Lazy 07:26 Focus Compounds Deeply 09:13 The Subtraction Exercise 10:21 My Burnout Wakeup Call 12:39 Remove Before You Add 13:09 Resources: Book And Links 14:39 Final Thanks And Subscribe

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Key Insights

So, there’s a thought that I’ve been toying with lately, and honestly, the more that I think about it, the more that I think most people have this completely backwards. The thought is, when someone feels stuck, and I’m in a very unique position to see this a lot as a physician, when they feel like they’re super behind or not making progress, the first thing that people do is add something. A new habit, a new system, something new that they read about, some new goals or structure that they saw in a video on YouTube. More hyper optimization. I can’t tell you how often I see this, and it seems like the best thought. I get it. That feels like you’re doing it the right way, like you’re being much more serious about moving forward. But again, here’s what I keep seeing, and I see this with patients. I see this with the people that I work with as clients. I have lived this myself. Trust me, I’m not trying to be a hypocrite here. I’ve been there many times. The people who actually progress and move forward over time, like genuinely succeed year after year, have less going on, not more. They have fewer commitments. They have fewer active goals at the same time, and we’re going to get into that in a minute. Yet, somehow they get significantly more done. Because I used to be over here in that group that just had the biggest plate of all time, and I thought that adding was the only move to be more successful, because you see people, oh, just outwork the others, just do this, do that. I wanted to understand it, because it was bothering me that I didn’t. And now I’m going to walk you through what I figured out. You are really going to want to stay for this, because what I’m about to cover is what’s actually happening in your brain when you have way too many things happening at once, why adding more almost always backfires, and then what you can actually do about it. I’m going to move through this efficiently because I respect your time. This doesn’t have to be a 30-minute video. I may talk fast at times, but just rewatch if you need to or slow it down. But, stay with me because the practical part at the end is going to be incredibly useful in your life. So, let’s start simply. Let’s start by kind of putting it into some more computer terms cuz that’ll make sense for people. Your brain is running background processes constantly. I mean that literally, okay? Every unfinished commitment, every goal you’ve set that you haven’t touched, everything on your to-do list that you’re going to get to, been there. Those are all just open background apps running. And they don’t just sit there not taking any cognitive load waiting for you to open them again. They’re running in the background all the time. They’re taking up cognitive space, burning through your mental energy whether you’re aware of that or not. And there’s good research on this. Unresolved decisions actually drain more cognitive energy than unfinished task. Meaning that the things you’ve been pushing off, that goal that you haven’t really started, but that habit you’ve told yourself you’re going to do, that is costing you a lot more mental bandwidth than if you just decided to not do it at all. The point is if you just decided not to do it at all, you would have at least closed that background task. Does that make sense? When you have 15 things that you’re technically working on, your brain isn’t just carrying 15 things when you sit down to focus and work. It’s carrying 15 things all the time. That cognitive tax and load is constant. And what you end up with is a constant low-grade exhaustion. I’m sure that resonated. This is also really hard for people to trace back to the cause, and honestly, this is something that I can kind of feel out in the room with patients sometimes when I’m talking to them, but in a doctor-patient setting, it’s often times, I find it difficult at least, to trace that back to the root cause as well. This is really something that I’m making the video about because I

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