In this episode, we talk about how to trick your brain and body into accepting new norms so you can achieve what you're trying to achieve.​

Transcript:
Hey, everybody! It's Matt Hsu from Upright Health and welcome to Episode 22 of the Upright Health podcast. Today, I'm actually recording from my hotel room in beautiful St. Louis, Missouri. I am actually stretching, so you might hear a little bit of movement going on while I'm talking. Hopefully, it doesn't get too distracting. But I do want to set a good example, so I wanna let you know that I am, in fact, stretching this morning.
Today’s episode is about normalcy and redefining normal for yourself. This idea kind of hit me a couple weeks ago and it's come up multiple times actually since. And even being in here in Missouri actually makes me think about it even more. So a couple weeks ago, I was scrolling through Instagram and I came across a female bodybuilder’s, I know what you call it, feed. Anyway, I saw a couple of her photos. And I thought, “Oh, look at this body. Look at what she's achieved.” And I've seen this woman's pictures on my feed before. I have her on my feed because somebody else I know actually really admires her, so I figured, “Okay, I'll follow this person.” So now I've seen this person’s photo multiple times -- this bodybuilder’s photo multiple times. And I realized, as I was looking at her picture, I realized, “My god, I've actually started to think that this is actually a fairly normal body type.” And for background, this woman is probably at like eight percent body fat. Meaning she is very, very lean. Her abdominals look extremely defined. I'm sure you've probably seen it where ladies abs started looking like they're so lean, that they have the abs of a very strong man, which that's fine, I'm not saying that's bad. It's just, I don't particularly find it attractive, honestly. But the reason I bring this up because to achieve that for a woman, you'd have to be in an extremely low body fat and actually have a body fat percentage that is generally considered not healthy for a woman.
So on top of these amazing abs, she has probably size, I would say D, if not bigger, obviously fake breasts. So what my brain is starting to see is this extraordinarily rare body over and over and over again. And it's starting to become normal to my. And I realized this. I was looking at it and I realized that there was no sense of like “Oh, this is shocking. This is something that is total outlier in my human experience.” Instead, my brain was saying, “Yeah, all women are supposed to look like this.” To me, it's number one, it's a little perverse because obviously, that is not a normal body type or certainly not common. But the number of exposures my brain has now had to it, has turned into something that could be considered normal and common, if I didn’t have consciousness and awareness of what was going on.
So the idea of defining “normal” for yourself I think is actually extremely important. This comes up for people who… there are a lot of people who talk about this concept of not watching the news or not reading newspapers because it starts to make your brain think things about the world that are just not true. For example, you see enough news reports about killing, death, war, racism, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, you start to think that everything in the world is nothing but killing and death and murder and pillaging and all these horrible things simply because you're being exposed to it over and over again. When really, if you would just go outside and walk the street – unless you're in a particularly bad neighborhood -- you're not going to run into that same stressful level of high frequency violence and death and destruction. So I want to talk about how to use this phenomenon to your advantage. So, in terms of your own physical fitness, in terms of your own habits, in terms of the things that you are trying to accomplish,