SOLO | Make Money by Feeling Better: Protect Your Mind, Guard Your Inputs, and Build Real Community

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What's going on everybody?

Welcome back to the show, this episode.

It's just me, you and the Mike, and we are talking a little bit about how to feel better.

I've noticed this trend recently,

have the last five to 10 years,

really since I've been diving deep into the personal development space,

where people, like us, who are some of the most blessed people,

to have ever existed on this planet,

meaning that we're not constantly worried about where our next meal is coming from.

We're not drinking dirty water.

We're not being conquered by other emperors trying to expand to their kingdoms,

and we're not fighting battles with swords,

even though we're just a farmer or something like that.

The life that we have been given,

the time that we're alive is the best time in history to be alive.

Yet, we are in the middle of the mental health crisis.

So, what gives?

What's the deal?

How is it possible that we have dropped into this beautiful moment in time?

Yet, a huge portion of us are still walking around,

feeling like we're trying to escape the saber-toothed tiger

who's threatening our camp or something like that.

It just, it seems like a wild time.

So, these are just a few things that I wrote down.

I don't have much to say about these other than this is just my anecdotal experience

for things that I do to make myself feel better

when I notice that there's just this negative trend of my mood over time,

which is also a good reason to track these things as much as you can

to even like take an account, write out numbers for like how you felt that day

so you can look at it over a four or five month, six month period,

and then have some sort of like an idea, like a plot on a graph of like,

oh, my mood seems to be overall trending downward over the last six months.

That's a problem.

Maybe I should do something to address that.

So, here's a few things that I've done over the years to just feel better.

First off, and this one gets me in trouble sometimes.

And look, I don't know what to say about that.

If you disagree with me, you disagree with me,

but this has been wildly helpful for me in my life.

And that is stop overconsuming or talking about things that are negative

and outside of your control.

And the biggest culprit behind this is politics.

We can't get away from politics.

It's everywhere.

You open up your phone.

Even for somebody like me who tries not to engage in it that much,

I still get fed all of these things in my social media feed about politics.

And there's always, you know, you try to get away from it

and then some comedian you follow has a politician on or something like that.

And it's just like, oh, man, why can't we just not talk about this stuff all the damn time?

And I first heard this from Tim Ferris.

I believe it was in his book The Four Hour Workweek where he was talking basically

about productivity hacks, focus hacks.

And this is one of the things that he said.

And from that point forward a few years ago,

I decided to really just try to move this stuff out of my milieu, my daily life.

And once you imagine that, imagine that it actually worked,

because what happens is media and the news have trended in a direction of attention.

They are also a part of the attention economy,

just like all of us who are podcasting or creating stuff are.

The difference is that they used to be a trusted source of objective events

that were occurring around the world.

So people would tune into their television sets all at the same time,

have their trusted anchor and download all the information, the news of the day.

And then 24, seven news started rolling around and then people started doing commentary.

And then a lot of the stuff is just opinions about events that are happening.

And then you have not just the host's opinion,

but then they bring on six guests at the same time.

And they're all arguing with each other, fighting over each other.

It's basically, to me, what it's become is the intellectuals soap opera.

It's the person who would perceive themselves or categorize themselves

as being someone who's intelligent, somebody who reads a lot,

maybe has a degree or got a master's or something like that.

And they look at it as their responsibility to be aware of all of these events

that are happening around the world.

Yet it has become like their version of reality television,

where they're watching this, again, this negative energy,

this combative energy in front of their eyes basically all day every day.

They just have the news on and they're watching all these people argue

and fight over all of these things and give their opinion.

This person gives their opinion.

And to me, it is only something that will prevent you from accomplishing

any of the things that you set your mind to.

Because it pulls you into these rabbit holes of negativity spiral.

And it's really difficult to get out of those things.

And I think that you won't notice it day one.

You won't notice it day two.

But again, over a five, six, seven, eight month period

where you've just over consumed too much politics,

you're just going to find yourself feeling crappier.

Why? Because it's a massive input.

Your inputs become your outputs.

So if you're constantly receiving this input of negativity,

then you have no choice but to output some of that negativity.

And you're just going to feel like an overall dampening of your mood.

And then you're going to catastrophize everything that the people

on the news are catastrophizing, thinking that the world is burning.

And then we're on a cruise.

My wife and I went on a on a workaholics cruise.

So for those of you who watch the show workaholics,

I'm divine and Anders and Blake and Kyle Neuchek all this guy.

So we went on this cruise and we're in this like this podcast,

a live podcast with Chad Kroger and JT Par,

who I think are just hilarious.

They do all these like city council.

They actually like go into the city council

and put up these proposals and it's like dead.

They're fully and completely in character the whole time

and it blows my mind how they do it,

because they're, anyway, they're hilarious.

Anyway, so we're in this room.

They're doing this live podcast.

At the end, they opened it up to Q&A.

And there are more than one questions

that were regarding like the political climate of,

you know, what we're all dealing with right now.

And there's this one girl who mentioned something about,

ask them something about if they wanted kids or something

and then they asked her if she wanted kids

and she was like, I just don't feel comfortable

bringing a child into the world the way that it is right now.

And in my mind, like it was such a jarring thing for me to hear

because of what I mentioned at the very beginning of this episode,

which is that there's never been a better time to do this.

Like at what point in history would have been better

for you to go back to, travel back to

and bring a kid into that version of the world.

It is this adopted belief of pessimism

that is destroying people's lives and futures

and to think that that would be something

that would prevent somebody from the joy of raising a child

because they're bought into some political ideology

that's told them that this version of the world

is way worse than the version of the world that we knew

20 years ago, 40 years ago, 80 years ago

is a ridiculous premise, but we're bought into it

because we just soak in all of this terrible negative energy

that just can't help but permeate to your core

and then come out and manifest itself

in these types of life altering belief systems

and it was wild to see it happen in person

and they handled it really well

when they were on stage, I forget exactly what they said

but it was sort of along the lines of what I'm saying,

which is like, there's always gonna be obstacles

to raising kids, there's always gonna be problems that arise

and if you feel that there's a problem with the world

then maybe having a kid and raising your kid

with the beliefs that you have might be a potential solution

to the problems that you believe are making life

objectively terrible at the moment in your mind.

I guess I should say subjectively terrible.

So stop over-consuming the news guys.

There's just a stat that I read recently,

I might butcher it, but you can look it up

and Google fact check me on this

if it sounds a little bit too high

but it was something close to 80% of news headlines

are written with some form of a negativity bias

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they know what's gonna get you to click that link,

they know what's gonna get you to watch

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they know what's gonna get you to share with your friends,

the friends that agree with you

or the friends that disagree with you,

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and continue engagement so they can increase viewership,

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Like this is their playbook yet there are so many.

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Any of us, and included in this bucket

because I find myself going down

some of these rabbit holes.

In fact, it was a conversation that I have

with a friend of mine who is even less engaged in politics

because he's constantly working and just didn't have time for it.

And there was a couple of things that I brought up

that he was completely oblivious and unaware of.

And I was like, I kind of miss being oblivious

to these types of things because there's just no use.

It's wildly outside of my control.

There's nothing that I can do about it.

All it does is just stir this hatred and anger inside of me

for some other group that I have not personally met

or connected with or had conversations with.

And I just find it to be an objective waste of time

for the most part, especially if you're not already

in a position where you can do something about it.

Like there's some people that I see

that are following this arc of like they built value

through a business or they were a creator or something.

And then they have this massive exit

where they became really huge

and then they started getting into politics.

And it's like, I don't like it when I see it

because I preferred their other content

before they became political.

But I can at least understand where they're coming from

where it's like, okay, well you're worth a half a billion dollars now.

You actually have the ability to make an impact on this

and maybe there are some things that you can control

about some of the outcomes that you don't like

that are happening in the world around you.

But for the majority of us normal people

who are just focused on paying the bills,

living a good life, providing for our family,

having a good time with our friends,

it just like interjecting these things into our daily lives

is objectively making our lives worse.

And you see, I mean, the last election cycle,

the last couple of election cycles,

we've seen lifelong friendships destroyed

over the fact that somebody dared to post something online

about their political beliefs.

And then all these other people are making them

feel bad for those things

or they're further confirming those things.

And it's like, look, neither one of those is great.

And again, the majority of this is outside of your control.

And if you're not a political,

if that's not what you're doing for a living,

if you're not running for office,

or if you're not trying to affect policy change,

if you're not a lobbyist,

if you're not actively involved in that world,

I just don't see a ton of reason

to be fully educated on everything.

Because that's the problem, right?

Is that you can't be fully educated on everything.

First of all, because we're not in the rooms

behind closed doors where all the decisions are actually being made.

So we don't even have all the information.

We think that we have more information than we do,

but we really don't.

And then also, there's nothing that you can do about it,

even if you had the information at hand.

And so yeah, I just find that the majority of the time

that you're spending doing those things,

it's just gonna be more of a negative effect over your life

than a positive effect.

And I'm not suggesting that you fully

and completely bury your head in the sand

and just not know anything about what's going on in the world.

But my sort of view on it is like,

if it's a big enough thing,

I'll hear about it.

Like if it's enough of something that's worthy of being known,

then somebody's gonna tell me about it at some point.

But like I said, I hate, I fight back against the concept

that everybody should just have a fully flushed out

of opinion about everything.

It's just like, we don't have all the information.

There's people who dedicate their entire lives

to like this one policy that you're talking about

from this armchair expert position.

You know how we can solve the water crisis?

Or just by doing this, I don't know why we don't just do this.

If they elected me, we'd take care of it in three months.

It's like, really?

You think that you, like the version of you that you are

right now, if you were in office,

you'd be able to just solve this problem

that people have spent decades dedicating their entire lives

to research and trying to solve themselves.

It's wildly nuanced.

It's almost impossible to solve from our perspective.

And so, and you, the time that is spent

worrying about all these other things.

If that time was spent doing other things

that actually affected your day to day life,

then you would find the overall quality of your life

to be better by just focusing on other things

that actually have the ability to create change in your life.

So limit your news sources.

You know, mute commercials if you have to.

Stop listening to all these political podcasts

in your free time and your spare time.

And listen to stuff that's gonna be more encouraging.

Choose the inputs that are going to encourage you

or that are going to enrich your soul or your psyche.

Choose the things that are going to allow you

to live a better version of life, not a worse version of life.

Because if you get sucked into these negativity

bias headlines, then you're just going to start

adopting this worldview that everything's negative,

that the world is burning and that we live

in a terrible time and everything's horrible.

And if you believe that about the world,

that it's really difficult to see the opportunity

that exists through all of the bullshit.

Whereas if you adopt the other perspective,

you're gonna start noticing that opportunity's open up

to you because that's the belief that you're adopting.

The fact is that nobody on this planet

sees reality as it is.

We all see reality through our skewed perspective.

That is the version of reality that you see.

So the cool thing about that is if that is the case,

then you get to choose which version of reality

you accept as truth in your life.

And so I look at it as if I can choose a version of reality

that is useful to me and not harmful to others,

then I'm going to choose that versus something

that is harmful to me, even if it's not harmful to others.

And I think a lot of people are just diluting themselves

into believing that everything's burning

and the world is on fire and there's no opportunity

and the economy sucks and I can't get a job

and I can't do this and I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't.

And it's like, man, well, it's really difficult

to try to create any sort of abundance in your life

if that's the initial belief that you're holding true.

And so yeah, stop overconsuming negative things in general.

I think politics is the first example

that comes to mind because it's so prevalent

and it permeates every area of our society

and it's something that you sort of get criticized

for not caring about or you get lumped into a bucket

of privileged people who just can afford

to not care about those things or something.

I don't know, I just find it to be extremely useful

to remove myself from all that stuff

as much as I possibly can and focus on the positives,

focus on the great stuff that I have,

the awesome opportunities that the world affords to me now,

the beautiful time that we live in

and all the amazing things that we're blessed with,

especially as Americans and especially in the year 2026.

So stop overconsuming negative things.

Next, schedule time with friends and family.

The number one common denominator

between all the blue zones on this planet,

the blue zone, and if you haven't heard of blue zones,

blue zones are the parts of the planet

where there's the highest concentration of centenarians

people who live to be past 100.

And what they found through studying these different,

these five different regions on the planet

is that none of them follow the same diet.

None of them follow sort of these traditional bio-acking

things like some of these communities are active smokers,

they drink alcohol, they're not doing cold plunges

and breath work and meditation and all this other stuff

that we've told ourselves is the thing

that's gonna make us live past 100.

The number one common denominator between all of them

is a very strong sense of belonging and community.

Bar none, that is the number one thing

that unites all of these blue zones.

So get more actively involved and plugged in

to the community that you have.

If you don't have one, then you gotta do the hard work

of finding one and building that community.

Like getting around friends and just laughing

and enjoying each other's company

and talking about things that have been official for you

and having stimulating conversations

with people that you care about,

those types of things are going to allow you

to live a much better version of life.

Schedule a game night, schedule a dinner party,

schedule of go see some comedy.

Go watch something that makes you laugh, makes you smile

instead of something that makes you upset.

Go to a concert, get around some good music,

get around some good, not to use this term too much,

but get around some good vibes

and it will raise your overall energy significantly.

So schedule time for community style events,

things that will get you more plugged in

to feeling a sense of belonging with people that you love

but also with the community at large.

Like that's the beautiful thing about comedy

or concerts or things like that,

is you get into room with a bunch of people who don't know

but you're all sort of on this same wavelength of energy.

You're all sort of on this higher,

whatever vibration if you wanna call it that

and the more you do those things,

the more enriched you're going to feel on the inside.

The better you're going to feel on a day to day basis.

Lastly, if there's a hack to feeling better,

this is the hack and it's gratitude.

Practice gratitude, it's just like anything else.

The more you practice it, the better you get it doing it

and it sounds silly.

Growing up to me, it was always just like Thanksgiving time,

write down all the things that you're grateful for.

Let's go around the table before we eat our turkey

and say something that we're grateful for

and before it was just like I'm making a list.

And so when I say practice gratitude,

it's not just like, oh, here's some things I'm grateful for

and then let's move on to the day.

It's write down those things, take two, three, four minutes

and just really feel how grateful you are

for the presence of those things in your life.

And it can be something massive,

like a family member beating cancer or something like that,

like this awesome feeling of victory that you have

as a group, as a unit over this terrible disease thing.

But it could also just be something simple,

like the smell of coffee in the morning

or a hug from your spouse or watching your kids

go down a water slide for the first time.

Anything like this, from this wide range of things

that we, of teeny tiny things, to huge things,

to things we take for granted, like our eyesight

or the ability to walk or the ability to hear,

to taste, touch, smell, to experience the world,

to be able to hike in nature and see this view

that just is incredible and it stimulates your mind,

try as much as you can to practice this gratitude

on a daily basis, because it's impossible to be anxious

and grateful at the same time.

It's impossible to be stressed and grateful at the same time.

It's possible to be depressed and grateful at the same time.

You can't experience both of those emotions at the same time.

So the more you practice this gratitude thing,

the more likely you are to end up in that state

more throughout the day.

And so have this like practice of gratitude,

but then secondarily, the,

some of it's been really helpful for me,

is whenever I notice that I'm in a really good state,

a state that I would, that I would mark

as a state that I would like to be in more,

like whatever that is, peace, gratitude, joy,

happiness, fulfillment, meaning,

any of those types of, you know,

I try to stay away from saying like positive emotions

or negative emotions or whatever,

but anything that I would view

is something that enriches the quality of my life

or the way that I feel about the quality of my life.

Anytime I'm feeling that on accident,

I try to use that as a trigger

to feel that emotion as much as I possibly can.

So instead of, you know, seeing my kid do something really cool

or say something to me that is just really sweet

or something like that, and then I just go,

oh, that was cool.

And then I just move on and get back into my phone

or get back into working or something.

I try my best and I don't, and I'm don't do it every time

and I'm not, and I'm constantly working on this

because it's something that needs to be worked on.

But it's been helpful for me to not just have this like

practice of gratitude, you know, in the morning

when you write in a journal or something like that,

but also to have this, this, this, this,

this reinforcement of the good feeling

that I have in any particular moment.

So now when I see something or I'm experiencing this feeling,

I try to just close my eyes and allow myself

to feel it to the fullest possible extent.

Because every time you do that, you're basically,

you're basically expanding the neural pathways

in your brain to allow your default state

to be pushed more into the positive direction,

rather, rather to be pushed more into the negative direction.

That's where a lot of these things come from,

anxiety, fear, stress, some of these things

that we label as negative things.

A lot of it comes from the fact that that's sort of

what our brains are hardwired to do.

We are more motivated by fear than we are anything else.

That's just, you know, evolutionarily true.

So the more that you can fight back against that,

the more that you can practice just allowing yourself

to be in that state, the more habitual it becomes,

that the easier it is for your neurons to fire

into that direction, rather to fire into another direction.

It's like forging a path in a field.

You know, the first time somebody walks through it,

they got a machete through all this brush and stuff,

but then when the, you know, five...

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100th person walks through that area.

It's basically a path because all the brush has been worn down

and there's a clear way to travel.

And it's much easier to get to the destination.

It's the same thing that's happening in your brain

is at least how I understand it.

I'm no neuroscientist, but I've read a good amount about it.

And that's basically how I have interpreted it.

It is basically you have these neural pathways

and the more that you allow your brain to go to these areas

and then feel it to the fullest extent,

the more that you're chopping away at the brush.

So that next time it's a little bit easier to go

in that direction than it is for you to go

to the other direction of anxiety or fear or stress

or any of these other things that we would look at.

So there's just a few things.

Like I said, these are not steeped in research.

Although some of them are definitely the gratitude thing,

the neural pathway thing.

A lot of these things are very much steeped in research.

I'm just saying that these are the things

that I've done in my life.

When I catch myself being in a negative mood more often

than a positive mood, these are some of the things

that I try to implement into my life to make sure

that I can have control over the mood that I have

versus allowing my mood to just adjust

with the ebbs and flows of life,

whether I got enough sleep the night before

or this event happened that I perceived as negative.

And then I'm going to immediately go back

into this negative state.

Like if I'm feeling this, I like to just

monitor my inputs and my over-consuming negative things.

My over-consuming negative marketing messages

and my over-consuming political discussions

and my over-consuming arguments and religious ideologies

and warring and contention,

or am I over-consuming or not over-consuming,

but am I consuming good things, positive things,

things that make me feel better.

So monitor your inputs, stop consuming politics.

That's the first thing.

And then schedule time with friends and family

get more connected to the community

that you have, like local community, family, friends,

but then also a community at large

and then also a gratitude practice.

Those are the things that I do to help myself feel better.

So hopefully that is helpful for you

if you're listening right now as well.

And that's it for this episode of the show.

As always, you can reach out to me on Instagram,

at Travischappel, or just shoot me an email,

Travisatrafchappel.com.

I love to talk about any of these things with any of you.

And if you have any questions, shoot them over

so we can address them on a future episode.

Thanks for tuning into this one.

We'll catch you guys in the next one.

Peace.

Hi, this is Alex Cantrowitz.

I'm the host of Big Technology podcast,

a longtime reporter and an on-air contributor to CNBC.

And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out

how artificial intelligence is changing

the business world and our lives.

So each week on Big Technology,

I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech

and outsiders trying to influence it.

Asking where this is all going,

they come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon,

and plenty more.

So if you want to be smart with your wallet,

your career choices, and meetings

with your colleagues and at dinner parties,

listen to Big Technology podcast wherever you get your podcasts.