The Secret to a Quiet Mind in a Noisy World - E160

So if you're tired of feeling mentally scattered and want to finally take back control, we always say we're going to teach people how to become the shock callers and reclaim control as the dominant forces of their decision-making process. If you're ready to take back control of your attention, this conversation is going to be for you. So let's make sense of quieting the mind in this noisy world that we live in. Have you noticed that the world that we live in has been doing most of the thinking for you? That your beliefs, perceptions, reactions, fears, and doubts have been shaped by unsolicited outside noise? How easy it's been for you to slip into that default sleep walking mode and label it as life and reality. Yeah, that ends here. Welcome to the Make Sense with Dr. J.C. podcast. This is your opportunity to start thinking for yourself, reclaim control, and step back into that role as the shock caller and dominant force of your own reality. It's when you change the way that you look at things that the things that you look at begin to change. So let's wake up, let's rise up, and let's make sense of why and how shift happens. Hmm, makes sense. Great morning world, great morning humans, and I want to welcome you to another edition of the Make Sense with Dr. J.C. podcast. I want to welcome you officially to the uprising of the sleepwalking masses. I don't know why we are together here today in this moment, but I will say that I'm honored and I'm also very curious to learn about it. So this is the secret to a quiet mind in a noisy world. Just as a preface, I'm in the process of fiercely writing my second book. For those of you that haven't gotten it yet, this is the book that I just published. It's called Make Sense, How to Rewire Your Mind and Transform Your Life, and a lot of people have it. When you buy this book, you get access to a free mastermind that we have on the second Tuesday, so that'll be next week on Tuesday. And we go through the book, and this is pretty much the body of all of my work. But I'm writing my second book right now, and I won't state the name of it yet because it's so cool and I don't want to give it to anybody yet. As I'm writing this book, the essence of the book, and it kind of prompts this discussion today, is that I've just been an observation that we have this tendency as humans, and it's just the way that we're wired. It's not a weakness or anything, but we have this tendency to be a little bit careless with what we care about. And one of the chapters of that book deals with this concept that we entertain of having a noiseless life. What does that mean to you? To have a noiseless life. This discussion today is kind of like a little bit of an excerpt from that chapter, because it made a lot of really interesting discoveries. It's a very frustrating thing to try to live a noiseless life because of the way that we're wired to think that we would achieve that goal. But I think by the end of this, you're going to have a new perspective, which is what we always try to do on the Make Sense Podcast. Hopefully that will arm and equip you with awareness of something new that might suit your needs, might suit your goals and dreams. It begins with a little bit of a question, just to see who we're dealing with right now. Do you ever feel like your mind is always racing? Maybe it prevents you from sleeping. Maybe you feel a little bit scattered. In our Make Sense ecosystem, we always say that we believe that everyone, and that includes you and me, and everyone is highly capable, but just scattered. So do you ever feel like your mind is racing? Well, in this episode, we're going to explain how to stop overthinking. We talked about that last week, so we'll hit on that a little bit because it's so powerful. And we're going to learn how to reclaim our focus in a world, if you think about it, that's really designed to distract you. Your most powerful commodity right now is actually your attention. If you think about it, everybody's trying to grab it. Am I trying to grab your attention right now? Maybe it's not my intention to grab your attention. I think I'm coming from a place where I'm more interested in sharing something or paying something forward to you that will enrich you. But if you're going to spend some time with me right now, you're hopefully going to give this your attention. So it's happening all over the place. But we're going to dive into why trying to quiet the noise never really seems to work. And what you should do instead, just simply find peace. I guess I would say that that would be a necessary goal of your day is to experience and find peace. And that's what this episode is going to be about. We're going to learn how to stop letting things like social media, opinions, constant notifications, all those things control your mood and your life. We're going to learn how to stop wasting our emotional energy on things that don't bring you joy and success. So once again, if you have a goal to be at peace today and experience joy and success, because a lot of people haven't made that decision yet, but this episode is going to be for you. So what if I could show you how to quiet a noisy mind? Would that be beneficial to you? For me, it saved my life over and over and over again. It will save my life again today because my mind, I don't know about you guys, but my mind gets noisy. If you're tired of feeling mentally scattered and want to finally take back control, we always say we're going to teach people how to become the shock callers and reclaim control as the dominant forces of their decision making process and their perception. If you're ready to take back control of your attention, this conversation is going to be for you. So let's make sense of quieting the mind in this noisy world that we live in. So everything begins with a, hmm, you see it on my hat. And it's just a curious way of taking note of something and saying, I haven't made up my mind about it yet, but it's got my curiosity or I've at least noticed it. And we're going to circle back to that in a little bit. But I've been extremely curious and I don't know if you have to about something lately. Have you ever noticed that there's moments in our life, maybe while we're on vacation, maybe after times of being in deep focus, or maybe in a moment of presence at a seminar or a retreat, I was talking to the plant medicine world. These are people that all go on these retreats and they have these amazing breakthrough experiences. Could happen at a seminar, it could happen from meditation, but we just experience what it's like where everything feels quieter. So I don't know if you have any practices like that, but there's these experiences that we have in life where we get a little bit of a taste of what it's like to feel like everything in life has gotten a little bit quieter. It's just a joy. Like I said, it could even be vacation. In fact, that is probably the number one reason. It's not so much about doing plant medicine, but I go on that journey once a year. I've been many, many times for about five years now to the Amazon jungle and I sit with plant medicine. I'm not telling everybody that they should do that. I was called to do it, but that's one of the main reasons that I go out there is it's a great way to break free from myself. Joe Dispenza, who is just one of the greatest minds out there, as far as I'm concerned, he does a talk called Breaking the Habit of Being Myself. So think about that for a second. Is there value and what would that be like to break the habit of being yourself? I just think it's a great idea because I find like the idea of getting out of my own ways an indication that it's not an extrinsic problem. It's me. So we go on these events and we experience what it's like to get quiet, or you might even have a great day and you're in flow, and you experience what it's like to have less noise. We come back from that experience or we wake up the next day and then we come back to our normal life. So I want you to kind of like viscerally experience what that's like to have this wonderful, quiet, clear moment. And we come back to our life, our phones, our routines, and our responsibilities. I'm working on another episode. We're going to talk about the responsibility thing. And that's an interesting topic right there. You know, I always like to ask myself, or I can ask you right now, are you taking responsibility for your life right now? Or are you caught up in the noise? I always think it's fascinating when it comes to this idea of the noise. It's very hard to be responsible on the noise because the noise kind of gives you an excuse to not be responsible, to be irresponsible. Now, if you call it irresponsible, it kind of sounds like a bad thing. But sometimes we give ourselves a whole pass from responsibility in life with our physical, mental, and financial well being because of noise. So that's just one to tuck under your pillow for later, maybe, is are you letting the noise give you that hall pass to step out of responsibility? Because who's in charge of your happiness, your joy, your fulfillment, and your success? You are. Nobody else. The noise is not responsible for it. And the eradication of noise is not responsible. So here's what's interesting about all that stuff that I just shared. Upon deep introspection of this phenomenon, where we have these moments of clarity and silence, and then we come back to the craziness to the noise, I found that it's not that the world got louder. Because sometimes when you really experience what it's like to be clear and focused, and you come back, it almost seems like the world, it's not just noisy, it's even noisier. So it's one thing to have noise, but sometimes when I go from clarity back into my regular world, I almost feel like it's noisier, or at least I notice I become highly sensitive to it or something. So it's not that the world got louder, it's more that you got quieter, right? And then noticed that something that was always there, but you notice it even more. So I don't know if that resonates with anybody. It's kind of like that first moment that we turn the lights on in the morning. I'm very, very much into quality sleep. And this is a discussion in itself. And two of the things that I do is I make sure that my environment is cold, but also very dark. Can't even see my hand in front of my face. And I go through extreme steps to make that happen. But when I go from that, and I first step into the light, I have to turn the lights on to go down the staircase. That's kind of what it's like. It's like lights have never been so bright when you move from the dark to the light. Just seems a little bit brighter than normal to go from peace and quiet and clarity into the noise. And that realization can feel overwhelming. So understand that we just put the O word in here. If you're feeling overwhelmed with life, it could be an illusion. You could just be highly sensitive to things that have always been there, but you're overwhelmed now because they're more apparent. That's what we're discussing. So it's about asking this question. A lot of people come to me and ask this question. How do I quiet a noisy mind in a world that never shuts up? So if we feel like we're living in a busy, busy world, a noisy world right now, God, we've got the war going on. We've got economy. We've got all these societal things and our identity and the social media reel that's telling you that you're not good enough, all of that stuff. It kind of can look like the world is not shutting up. So how do I quiet my mind in a world like that? And most people, I think, start to struggle because they solve this the wrong way. What people typically try to do to quiet a noisy mind in a world that doesn't shut up, they try to eliminate the noise. That's like, as I said a couple of weeks ago, that's like trying to nail a piece of jello to the ceiling. That's like trying to drink water with a fork to try to eliminate the noise. And I know that we're probably thinking, well, I have noise canceling headphones and things like that, but that doesn't eliminate the noise. That just eliminates your perception of it. So it's important to recognize that noise is always there. So they try to escape it and they try to control it there in. And, you know, it's very hard to control uncontrollables. And I always remind people that if you're feeling things like anger, frustration, and all of those icky feelings, very often you can always kind of dig into it and look deeper and recognize you're trying to control uncontrollable things. But what if I told you that that's not how all of this works to try to eliminate the noise? What if living a peaceful, focused life isn't about removing the noise, it's more about managing our focus and attention with it, our relationship with the noise. And this is going to be a big, big shift. This is some good shift. We're going to add this to your big pile of shift. So here's the truth. Thoughts, the thoughts in your head, they're going to think. Emotions are going to move. The world will keep spinning. The sun will always rise and distractions will exist. These things don't require our permission to show up. So park right there for a second. Think about all this concept of the noise and the distractions and the unsolicited criticism that we get and the thoughts in your head. None of those things require our permission to show up. However, they do require our participation to stay. We're going to talk about not participating with everything. Not trying to eliminate it, but just saying, I'm not going to participate in that. And you can do that in some walks of your life. So unwanted thoughts, feelings, and distractions are not the problem. The problem is our participation with them. So once again, feeding into this idea that we need to get out of our own way. And this is why so many people in this world today feel overwhelmed. It's not just that there's more noise. Remember, I don't think that there's more noise right now. It's more that we've become incredibly good at engaging with all of it. Now, if you look at all of the avenues that the noise is coming through all of the channels, well, yes, I could say that it becomes more difficult. But the question is, is there more noise? I always like to look back at these crazy times like the barbarians or, or even the civil war where, you know, the red coats and the blue coats would come and they would take a knee and basically everyone would die. Just imagine what that was like back then where the father of the house would be like, Hey, children, hey, wife, I'm going to go die. The chances of them living was like, no, imagine if we had social media and TV back then. So I believe that the noise is always there, you know, the distractions, but we just have more channels right now. And this is why so many people feel overwhelmed. The problem is not that it's happening. It's that we're increasingly engaging with it and we're reacting to it and often feeding it. I always say that what we consume on a regular basis ends up being what we assume. So if we're consuming the news and negative things that we're hanging around with the negative people all the time, well, of course, we're going to assume that to be our reality. We're giving too much emotional energy and meaning to these distractions that have always been there and they'll never not be there. If you have a good day and you find clarity, like I said, I go to the Amazon and I have this peaceful, clear moment. The distractions are still there. I'm just not paying attention to them at that time, but they're not eliminated. My sense making machine is unaware of them. I love to know that because I love the idea of being fully radically accepting of everything. Good days, bad days, they're all necessary. You can't have light without dark. This idea of giving things our attention, everything seems to feel important sometimes when we're overwhelmed. Everything seems to feel urgent and it feels like it deserves our attention. I see that very often people are involved in consuming the noise, therefore stepping out of responsibility, but then justifying why it's important. Even though they have no control over outcomes, they're trying to build an airplane in the sky, but they'll justify it and claim that it deserves their attention. Now that's an easy one, but we do that on autopilot. So does everything need your attention or have we just never learned how to filter what we give attention? Remember, this comes from this new book that I'm writing that addresses this idea that we're a little careless sometimes with what we give our care to. Once you acknowledge this, this idea that have I ever disputed and filtered, you know, in my book, it makes sense, we have this strategy, this exercise called the sorting filter. And it's just a simple process of allowing yourself to run things through a question filter. Is this important? Do I control this? Does this support the things that matter most to me? My desire to have a good day, which today might be my last? Have you ever disputed any of these things that we have decided deserve our attention? Because instead of trying to silence the storm, what we can do is just simply begin to notice it. So that's the power of the when I say, even though I don't have an answer yet, which pisses people off sometimes, I'm just saying noted, but I'm not sure what I think about it yet, because I haven't made up my mind yet. I'm going to allow myself in this world that demands certainty and demands rapid response. I'm going to choose to allow myself to think about it a little. Okay, we're going to instead of trying to silence to storm, we're just going to simply start to notice it and make that enough for right now. And you can do this with your thoughts as well. Instead of identifying with every thought, we begin to separate ourselves from it. We start to see that there's a voice in our head that isn't necessarily us. There's a voice in your head that is not necessarily you, and it's not speaking for you. It's a separate voice. It's a narrator. You know, some people would call it the ego. It's a conditioned pattern. It's a learned voice, meaning that we've adopted it throughout life. And it's, it thinks it's there to keep us safe, but could have reached its expiration day. It's a learned voice that presents things as urgent. I want you to capture that voice right now. Tells you this is urgent. This is meaningful or worthy of your attention. But we're entertaining the fact that that voice that's pitching that to you is not necessarily you. Once you can see this, everything's going to change. So what I'm going to do right now, and I would love to get some feedback from everybody, I want you to just consider what would you name your voice? Now, naturally, the name for my voice is the dragon. And what started out kind of as an exercise of me just identifying that there was this voice that was basically bullshitting me. It gave me the ability to say the dragon is talking a lot right now. Now, I've actually moved to the next phase where I've embodied the dragon because I found out how I could work with it. And it became a superpower of mine to embrace my fears. But what would you call the voice in your head? This is a huge, huge power move for the day to give that voice a name. So we have kazoo. That's awesome. I know who kazoo is. Patty, that's so great. I totally forgot about kazoo. Kazoo is a perfect one. And for those of you listening to the podcast, this is Patty watching live on YouTube. Miss you, Graham is what she goes by. Patty now has the ability when she has noise to separate herself from it and say, well, kazoo's got a lot to say today. So just think about how powerful that is. Because what you're doing before you give that voice a name is you're saying, I have a lot to say. I have a lot of noise. But what you can do with this name is you can now give yourself a little space between it because you see it as a separate entity and you don't automatically absorb it as yours. So once you can see that and you can give it a voice, you can stop automatically believing it, separate yourself from it. I'll share another one. We had a group the other day that I was talking about this topic and one of the members said that the name of her voice was Silly Goose. And I thought that was a great one. Silly Goose. And when the Silly Goose offered her a bunch of bullshit, a bunch of nonsense, she'd be able to now greet it in recognition and say, oh, Silly Goose, you're so crazy. But who the fuck asked you? So this is how we stop being so reactive. This is a tool. This is a strategy. This is a vehicle to take you to a place where you're less reactive, less sensitive to this process. The interface response system that's in the book makes sense is all about moving from reaction to thoughtful response. But this is how we stop being so reactive. We pause, we say, hmm, that's what hmm is, practice of cognitive distancing. Or we say Silly Goose, and that gives us space between us and the noise. So now we're starting to see that noise doesn't exist without our participation and our labeling and meaning. A distraction doesn't become noise until we make it noisy. So we pause, we create space between us and this hypothetical noise, and we move from unconscious. That's why we say welcome to the sleepwalking masses. We move from unconscious reaction to conscious choice. And that's called a response. And here's the realization that changes everything. Noise only becomes noise when you agree that it matters. Sit with that a second. Noise only becomes noise when you agree that it matters. So otherwise, we don't agree that it matters and we separate ourselves from it. It's not noise. It's just clouds moving through the sky. So take note when you get a chance to look up at the sky that the clouds don't make the sky. The clouds, like your thoughts, just pass through it. And I always challenge people that don't grasp that. Look up in the sky and pick a cloud and show me that that cloud is still there in the same place an hour later. Or take some sort of time lapse photography and you will prove to yourself that clouds pass on by. Tal Ben-Shahar, who's you're going to love his episode, he wrote a book called Happier No Matter What. He said, and I think I've shared this with you before, that if you don't pay any attention to the thoughts in your head, like the clouds, they'll go away. They'll eventually go away. I always like that visual. If you lasso one of those clouds and you grab onto them, we're saying if you don't grab onto them, they keep moving, right? But the moment that we do grab onto one of those clouds or thoughts or a name calling or a criticism, unsolicited criticism, the moment that we grab onto one of those clouds, they become the weather in our heads, in our minds. So remember what I said, that this is something that requires your participation. So we're entertaining the idea and there's tools to do this, that we don't have to care about everything and everyone in life. Now I know that's controversial, especially if you've decided, and how did you come to that decision? If you've decided something that you can't do anything about deserves not only your care, but everybody else's. If you're attached to that, you'll struggle with this idea. Can you entertain that not everything deserves our care, attention, and focus or participation? Now, if we grab onto one of those things, boom, we get that weather in our mind and it becomes our mood, our identity, and your day. If you're in a bad mood right now, or even if you're in a good mood, how did you get there? You participated with something. If you woke up this morning and grabbed onto one of these clouds, it's probably showing up right now as a forecast for your day. This is the value of the morning ritual. This is why I teach people the great morning rise up. And once again, that's another chapter in my book where I teach people how to reclaim control and actually choose which cloud that you're going to use, right? The one that best suits you. But sometimes we make a mistake, right? Sometimes we invest in the wrong property. And this is exactly what happens when we're overthinking. We spoke about the idea that overthinking acknowledges that very often our thoughts are what we consider uninvited guests. So we talked about that last week. Overthinking is what happens when we're trying to figure everything out. That's what overthinking is. Please explain to me how overthinking is beneficial. Can anybody do that for me? What we're doing when we're overthinking is we're grabbing clouds and turning them into storms. Remember, we always refer to that as the thought thunder storm. It's only a storm because we're trying to make sense of it all. And that's the nailing the jello to the ceiling. It's very difficult. It's impossible. We live in a world where being a multitasker is something that we consider a victory. So maybe the goal today is not to eliminate the clouds or eliminate the noise. Maybe the goal is to stop caring so much about the clouds. If caring was a currency, maybe the goal is to stop funding all the thoughts and the things that are showing up in the world that didn't require your permission. Remember that. They didn't require your permission to show up, but they do require it to stay. So if we look at caring about things as a currency, we're making some bad investments sometimes. We're caring about things that are not really worthy of our care. So to stop giving your attention to things that never earned your attention in the first place, that's what the goal is today. To stop giving your attention to things that didn't earn. How many times have you gotten caught up on somebody that just doesn't even know you, doesn't know what it's like to walk in your shoes and they say something mean to you and it creates weather in your head the whole day? Did they earn that space in your head? No, but you didn't think about that. Because when you learn to do this stuff, by the way, you don't eliminate all of these things. They're always there, but you do prevent them from being amplified into noise or that storm. And when that happens, here's the payoff. We always want to know is the juice worth the squeeze. When that happens, something incredible becomes available to us. Things like clarity, presence, direction, and tapped into our signal, the right frequency. So you're either in noise or you're in your signal. Now, if you don't know what your signal is, you would have to go through what we call in the book, the North Star exercise and create a North Star, make it bright with a Y, and then look at the things that you would need to do to make more of it, to leverage it into reality. That's what the signal is. So if you haven't thought about that process, you might not know. You might think that the noise is the signal. You might think that focusing on things that didn't earn your attention is important. You'll protect it and justify it. And this is what real attention management looks like, by the way. It's not controlling the world, but choosing what gets access to our attention, that hot commodity. So this is not about eliminating distraction, by the way. That doesn't work. I've tried it. Don't waste your time. It's more about becoming immune to it. Now, in my book, I call that becoming unfuck withable. So I don't know if you see any value in becoming unfuck withable. And in this current reality here in 2026, when we're doing this live, where everything is competing for our attention, this might be the most valuable skill that we can learn to develop in this world, is to decide. First, you have to let yourself know that you get to choose to decide what gets our attention. That's a big power move for today. Because the people who win and achieve in life and achieve their goals and dreams and make it to the top of the mountain where the table of success is, whatever that means to you, are not the ones who avoid noise. You'll never read a book about somebody that is free of noise. They're the ones that know how to care less about things that don't matter. So when you see me wear a shirt that says, breaking news, I don't care. Or I could care less about things. Some people get pissed off. Some people laugh at that. But what I'm saying is, is I reserve the right to decide what I care about. And I'm going to think about it before I make up my mind. I don't rush to make up my mind. So perhaps the next time that you take note of that voice, that inconvenience or maybe injustice in the world, that's a big one. But this is in just what's going on in the world. I'm not saying ignore that. But maybe we can respond by saying something like this. Huh. Hello, silly goose. How are you? Oh, wait a second. I already know how you are. Please forgive me, silly goose. But I'm not sure I give a damn. I don't know if I give a shit about what you just said yet. I'm working on my relationship right now with the things that matter most and my signal. So if you don't mind, I'll have to get back to you because I don't need to rapidly respond to something that I didn't ask for. Remember, it showed up without my permission. I'll get back to you. And I'm not yet certain when I'll get back to you. So you're free to move on until that time. So here's an anchor thought for you for the day as we close. The noise doesn't need your permission to appear, but it does need your participation to stay without your participation. Your life, therefore becomes noiseless. So that's it for today. Remember, if you learn something today, it's giving it away, sharing with others, paying it forward, which is what I'm doing right now, that helps it stay. So if you learn something today, give it away. That's how it's going to stay. And that is also how you leverage a good day. That's it for today. To support the Make Sense with Dr. JC podcast, be sure to subscribe, like and share, as well as follow the Make Sense sub-stack for free daily quotes, live streams and blogs. And remember, learning without action is just another form of distraction. If something hit home and you learn something today, give it away. That's the only way it's going to stay. See you next time.