How to rewire your brain
(diapers not included)
"Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed." - David Foster Wallace
In a timeless speech at Kenyon College in 2005, David Foster Wallace urges the graduating class to seek out the little things hidden in plain sight which give our lives true meaning. It’s a deeply profound speech that touches on perspective, empathy and how to be deliberate with how we spend our time and where we focus our attention. If you haven’t come across this gem already and you have the 20 minutes now, click on the link above and bookmark this essay for another time. Don’t think twice about it. You’re welcome.
At its core is a cry to break from the “default setting” that puts each of us at the very center of the universe. It's a provocation to do the hard work to rewire ourselves to pay attention to what’s going on in front of us instead of constantly dwelling on what’s going on inside us. This was a big ask in 2005. It feels like an even bigger one in 2022. In a world where 24/7 news is the norm and hundreds of digital platforms are continuously screaming at us for tiny atomized morsels of attention, rewiring your brain to focus on what matters can feel like scaling an endless glacier with tiny kitchen forks for crampons.
Over the years, I’ve embraced a number different approaches to help combat this. Practices like meditation and journaling helped but didn’t end up sticking.
Until one did.
On May 1st, 2018 I took the single biggest jump into rewiring my brain and it’s been compounding rapidly ever since. I became a dad. His name is Hugo. Two years later Idris and Laila joined the cosmic party together and by that point my “default setting” was up against some pretty serious competition.
"Having kids is like taking a massive fisheye lens to your life. Everything gets exaggerated, for better or worse” - Tiago Forte
Preach Tiago. Preach. Having kids is hard AF. Those first oxytocin fueled highs are unlike anything I’d ever felt but the lows are no joke. We were more tired than we’d ever been, less able to invest in ourselves and each other, more difficult to work with, less available to do all the things we loved to do. It exposed things about myself that I just didn’t know yet. Insecurities that had laid dormant since childhood. Things I didn’t even know I cared about until I had no choice but to give them up. And while the lows were low, what I didn’t realize at the time was that keeping three little humans alive brought about the single greatest brain rewiring hack that I had been seeking in other practices for years.
Brain Hack #1: Truly noticing things.
I didn’t realise how much I relied on speech as THE key decryption device for the world around me until the most important people in my life didn’t have access to that tool. Too hot? Too cold? Way too much deodorant today? Beard not long enough to pull at? The need to continuously scan for non-verbal cues for how a baby reacts to the onslaught of stimulus around them made me much, much better at simply noticing things. The cues are so unique and specific to each child that you have no choice but to fully enter their world and leave yours when you walk through that door.
Weird flex but I’ve always prided myself on being a pretty stellar multi-tasker. The one in the corner of the room getting to inbox zero while the meeting was in full flow. The one in the line for bagels who had to be tapped on the shoulder every time because I was booking concert tickets for that night while waiting to order my lox & cream on sesame. I was that guy. Well it turns out how many emails you have unopened in your inbox is just not a thing when your two year old falls off the top of a 6ft slide that you should have been helping him navigate.
As the stakes go up so does the value of real presence. And not just with my kids but in every other aspect of my life too. Once my brain was rewired this way I started noticing things I’d missed for years. How Larissa uncontrollably bites her upper lip when she’s hit by a wave of overwhelming love for the kids. How the few extra seconds of empty space when I stop talking in meetings creates an unspoken invitation for others to feel comfortable jumping in without having to be asked. Noticing how others' success inevitably led me to pull up their LinkedIn page to compare achievements as if it was the one universal barometer to instantly scorecard my life up to that point.
Brain Hack #2: Accurately valuing my time.
I got FOMO. A lot. Living in New York and London over the last decade didn’t help and I’d often find myself caught between commitments because I struggled to say no to all the temptations and possibilities I had waiting loudly outside my front door. The only real value I ascribed to time was the premium between my waking hours and my sleeping ones and how I could cram the former as full of things as possible while minimizing the latter.
But not all time is created equal.
This didn’t really hit me until I had to consider this equation as a parent. Sleep becomes instantly revalued. The time that you spend with the couple of people immediately around you slows right down and the world rapidly shrinks to fit within the four walls you and your new family inhabit. In those early days everything changes so fast and every one of those “firsts” is so fleeting that the deafening FOMO silently slipped away like sand flowing slowly through the inverted hourglass the universe had just tipped over.
Scarcity quickly uncovers value and the most immediate rewiring is just how deliberate I became about how I spent the greatly reduced “free” time I now had. It rewired what I paid attention to and what I didn’t. From which friends I spent my time with, to what news I read, to which emails I even chose to open (subject lines matter!). It’s now intuitively so much clearer to me where the signal is and what the noise looks like that saying no got a whole lot easier. Choice paralysis was real for me and the absence of choice (dealing with a 2am diaper explosion not really optional) can be an incredibly liberating feeling. In the moments where a choice has to be made, the higher conviction you’re making the right call is just as liberating.
Brain Hack #3: Seeking out meaning
"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders but they have never failed to imitate them" - James Baldwin
Am I spending my time on things that would make them proud? What am I going to be able to tell them I did to help at this very moment when they ask? Is this the city where I want to raise them? Is this the planet where I want them to grow old?
There has been no greater forcing function in my life to properly reflect on some of these questions than bringing tiny humans into the world. Part of the reason I’m writing this in the first place is to help them travel in time to better understand who their dad was at 37 when they’re asking me all the difficult questions I won’t be ready for at 57.
It’s so I can travel in time and only now truly appreciate the struggle my parents went through to impart purpose and meaning in us as they went through this same journey decades ago. Being a parent has led to more powerful feelings of gratitude than I could have ever hoped to find from a journaling practice. More acceptance of absolute responsibility for my life and that of these three new humans than I could have ever got from a Tony Robbins seminar (on the bucket list). This rewiring is here to stay and compounding every day.
So whether you're on 2am diaper run or up for the sunrise meditation.
Running the evening bath time routine or your morning journaling practice.
Decoding a babble or sketching a doodle.
If you’re trying to scale that glacier with kitchen forks in hand, whatever it is you’re doing that’s getting you a little higher up every day is worth leaning all the way into.
It gets sunnier near the top.