Fear Is Fuel with Patrick Sweeney

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you. I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence, first in myself and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Welcome to today's episode of the show. Today is perfect timing because we're going to be talking about feedback, fear, and how to use fear, how to work with fear. My guest expert is someone who's been studying fear from an internal experience of his own and then going on to study the heck out of it with neuroscience, and has gone on to teach people how to overcome fear, how to work with fear, how to use fear as fuel. In fact, that's the name of his book, which we'll be getting into as well. And I think this is a perfect time because there is so much fear. I mean, there's always fear in the background for us, right, if we're really honest and we slow down. But now it's just front and center with everything that's happening in the world. With the coronavirus and all the effect that that's having and the uncertainty in the world, there's so much fear. And whether you're feeling it or people that you know and love are feeling it, or you just tune into it in the collective, right? When you turn on the news and see what's happening in social media, you can. You can see what's occurring and how much fear there is and how in many ways we've been hijacked by it. And it's intense and the amount of fear and all the different ways that fear manifests, sometimes it's not just raw terror, but it manifests as blaming others or being enraged or being righteous. And so there's the collective fear right now, and we're going to talk about that with my guest expert as well, as well as that fear inside of all of us, you know, that predates this virus. Just that fear we can carry around, fear that we're not enough, fear that if we don't reach our goal, fear if other people are going to judge us, all the ways that fear can hold us back. And this is a fantastic interview. I Encourage you to get something to take notes on as you listen because he's got so much information. So I'm going to introduce him here and then we'll begin that conversation. But my guest expert today is named Patrick Sweeney. Patrick Sweeney is the author of a book called Fear is Fuel. And he brings six years of neuroscience research that he's done to developing life changing system, which he teaches us in the interview to really learn to use courage and unshakable confidence in the face of fear. And he has a great ability to really take a lot of neuroscience research and communicate it in a way that's very relatable, very understandable, very absorbable so you can actually use it. And it's really fantastic. I learned a ton in this interview and I can't wait to share it with you. But not only does he teach people how to do this through his book, through keynote speaking, through working with leaders and corporations, but he also has a history of learning how to overcome his own inner fear. And we talk about that in depth in the interview. But one way he's done that is through athletics. And he's achieved very highly in athletics. He was an Olympic rower and then also most recently, he won the world's toughest bicycle race called Race Across America. That was in 2018. So just a fact. Fascinating background and an incredible story of how do we work with fear and how do we grow with it, how do we activate courage in the face of it. And I can't wait to share this with you. Thank you so much for joining us on the show, Patrick.

Dr. Aziz, thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure. And all of your listeners who are turning in, thank you for taking the time out of your day.

Yes. And knowing everything I've read about you and what you teach. This will be highly valuable for our listeners and for me because I am a student of confidence. It's something I've been obsessively studying for the last 17 years. But really what that means is I'm a student of the things that can really detract from confidence. And the big ones that I found are a harsh inner critic. A lot of self judgment is one major detractor from confidence. And the other one is strong fear or low grade persistent ongoing fear and anxiety. So these are things that I've been very interested in and have helped a lot of clients with. And I'm always looking at for myself like what's the next level of liberation of confidence. So I'm so excited to learn from you. And so listeners can know a little bit more about your journey. And as I mentioned in the introduction, some of the things you've done require a lot of willingness to face discomfort, face challenge, face fear. But let's go way back before we hear more about what you teach and really look at sort of the man behind the lessons. When you were young, maybe child, teenager, let's say how did you relate? Was fear a big part of your life then? And how did you relate to was?

And not in a good way. So we grew up first generation Irish immigrants and my dad was working three or four jobs so I had fear of never having enough scarcity because we'd have literally Bisquick pancakes. I don't know if you remember what Bisquick was.

I do know what Bisquick is.

Yes. At least two, sometimes three nights a week. That's all we'd have for dinner because it just meant you could open a pack and mix some water in it and throw some syrup on it and you had dinner. That was all we could afford was $1.50 box of Bisquick for my brother and I. Scarcity and never having enough. I can remember when I was maybe six or seven years old before they had fair credit rules in the world and people knocking on our door and my mother saying we've got to shut out the lights and pretend like we're not home and those were creditors because we had past due bills. That was one source of fear, was the scarcity. The other source of fear was just getting bullied by neighborhood kids. We moved around a lot as my dad was bullying. Transitioning from job to job and always being the new kid meant you always had to prove yourself or get in a fight or get picked on. There was a tremendous amount of fear. All of it was under the umbrella. You mentioned it a bit, Dr. Aziz, that I was never good enough as a person. The kid at 16 years old who had the brand new Camaro and had the cheerleader girlfriend, they were always way better than me. I was never good enough and never strong enough and certainly never had a sense of self love. And I started trying to make money when I was 8 or 9 years old by shining shoes and then had my first job in a flower shop at 11 years old and thought money or then later in my life athletics would be a way to earn some self esteem and some self confidence. But you know, in reality for me it just ended up how I built up this facade. You know, I really went to the, to the other side to Hide my fear and my cowardice. And, you know, that's. That's what a lot of you see a lot of people doing that with money or with athletics or with clothes or, you know, other things like that. Just really hiding their own fears.

Yeah. Well, I love this. What a great start to this conversation because you teach people how to work with fear, use fear as fuel, and we're really excited to get into that. But what a great backstory so people understand that this isn't some kind of.

Like, this is how I master fear.

And it never bothered me kind of energy and like. No, I mean, it's such a relatable story. And. And what I'm curious about is because you continue up until this point, most recently with your Race Across America, but even when you were younger and getting into rowing, so you have accomplished a lot athletically. So when you were younger and you were getting into rowing and started to obviously excel at that, to the point that you were in the Olympic trials and all that, was that giving you a sense of confidence and self esteem because you were doing well at it?

You know, it's a great thing to explore because I had started out in high school. I went to high school in Keene, New Hampshire, and in high school was looking for a sport. Played baseball growing up, but then got in a fight with my coach in high school because I thought I knew everything and typical sort of teenage angst, and ended up finding cross country skiing, of all things, and got pretty good at it. Won a state championship in New Hampshire, wanted to ski in college and wanted to go ski in the Olympics and really earn this spot of respect. My second year at University of New Hampshire, which was a Division 1 ski school, so we were training all the time. It was highly competitive. The technique changed from diagonal stride, which is kind of what you do on the Nordic track machine in the gym, and it switched to skating, which was very much like rollerblading with poles. And I'm six three. And the big loping strides of diagonal stride became really a hindrance to me. And these shorter guys who could have a much higher cadence with their skating style were killing me. So I lost my position on the team and was no longer on the UNH ski team. The athletic director said, you're always training so hard as a skier and you've got the perfect build. You should try rowing. So it was a club program at unh and I got. The coach was just enamored with me because I was tall and aerobically super fit from skiing and. And So I got the welcome wagon brought out and within about two weeks we had to do a test on the erg, the rowing machine. And my technique was horrible. I could barely get up and down the slide. But I was so fit compared to most of the club athletes from cross country skiing. And it's a great, obviously full body aerobic workout that I set the ERG record for UNH within my first month of rowing. So I thought, wow, here's an easy sport. This is the one for me. My junior year, I won what was the club national championships, a regatta called Dadvales. I was horrified. I tell some stories in my book, as you mentioned in the beginning, Fear is Fuel, the new book that just hit the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. I tell a bunch of stories about the rowing to directly answer your question. Dr. Aziz. When I started rowing, I was always rowing out of fear. My first Olympic Trials in Camden, New Jersey, I finished 14th. And that was when in the single skull, in the one man rowing. That was when my parents sort of said, okay, you've messed around with this for a couple years now. It's time to get on with your life. And I said, no, I think there's more to it. I ended up finding a coach who spent more time, I think, working on my mental state on the water than anything else. Because I always had this belief that when I feel courageous, I can act courageous. And a lot of people do. And he was the one who showed me. It's really the opposite of that. You have to act courageous first and then you'll start to feel courageous. It's that scary. You mentioned doing a lot of things that make you uncomfortable. I always say you've got to be comfortable being uncomfortable to do anything great in life. We started working a ton on my mental stuff. It was very specific to rowing and to being on the race course. In the 96 Olympic trials in Atlanta, I finished second. And I had raced the World cup for three years. I wasn't appreciably more fit or stronger. I was rowing better technically, but I would say 10 spots out of those 12 spots that I increased in my ranking in the country was due to mental training. And I felt very confident on the water. I always felt like I had the best start of anyone that I was going up against. I had the best sprint, but I never learned until my near death experience. I never really learned how to translate that to other aspects of my life.

Yeah, so that's a great segue into that. You're achieving at this high level and you do feel confident about your abilities to perform when you're on the water. And then you also go on to excel in many other areas and in business and other types of sports and adventuring. Then you mentioned just now this near death experience. We could share a little bit more about that with our listeners and what happened and what shifted for you from that?

Sure. Well, it's interesting because as we sit and record this in the middle, the third or fourth week of the coronavirus here in Boston, I see a lot of similarities to what I was going through. Because I didn't have any self esteem and self confidence. I was always trying to build this facade. I was trying to put myself inside a cocoon where I could hide. Because anytime I felt fear as a kid, I felt shame with it. I felt like I should feel confident and I should feel like I'm good enough and I'm adequate and I never did. And so I was always trying to cover it up. And the athletic stuff and posturing that way was one thing I often tell people now, if I had a different motivation and different mindset, I could have been an Olympic gold medalist. But because I didn't have that confidence and that courage, it didn't happen. And when I went back to business school, I only wanted to go to a top 10 business school. And that's all I applied to. And I was fortunate to get the dumb jock entry. Every business school has a Navy SEAL and an Olympic athlete. So I got the Olympic athlete slot and went back to business school and decided I had one goal and that was 40 by 40. I wanted to make myself a net worth of $40 million by the time I was 40 years old. Fuck everything.

And how old were you at the time that you decided that?

So that would have been my, let's see, second year in business school. So I was probably 28, 29 years old. Okay, gave myself 10 years. And I'm just gonna jump in real.

Quick because I think that's fascinating, right? So you're like, okay, I'm gonna be the best, you know, that I can possibly be in rowing, right? And you are, you're competing on the world stage. And then it's like, okay, I'm gonna go into business. Okay, I'm go to the best business school that I can.

And.

And then I'm gonna set this like super ambitious goal to 40 by 40. And there's like this, and I think that's a fascinating topic. It's like where our ambition comes from and how there can be like, we're Called to. I believe that we do have this purpose or purposes in life that are revealed to us or we discover them. Maybe it's a combination. Sort of our path is illuminated as we go with these twists and turns. And obviously what we'll hear about in a minute. What happened with you, with your health was one. But then there's also these other ambitions that we have that people aren't aware of that can be really fueled by fear and fueled by the fear of, I'm not enough. I fear I gotta prove something. I fear I'm gonna be somebody. And so I'm really curious with that 40 by 40, do you think that was influenced by achieving something so you could feel like enough and there's a lot of fear in there, or do.

You think it was more Dr. Aziz? I don't think it. I know it. I mean, 100%. That was all about making me better than everybody else, better than all the kids I grew up with, better than all the other rowers, better than whatever. It was all about trying to give me a level of status that I didn't get with athletics. And so I thought, okay, well, I'll get it with money. And now I do a lot of work with an organization called YPO that I've been a member of for about 12 years, young presidents Organization. And I'm working with a bunch of other CEOs. And we did a retreat last year with a great group of guys. It was eight people, seven men and one woman. And two of the guys were billionaires. We started working on some of the. What I call what I refer to in the book as the fear frontier. They have a good side, and there's also a dark side to them and the shadow side of the personalities and these defense mechanisms we make as little kids. Excuse me, this one real estate billionaire who flew there on his G550. And he said he didn't have any hidden fears. And I had to stop and tell him and say, hey, that's why they're called hidden. So let's keep working on them. It turned out his superpower was protection in real estate. It was protection of his assets. He never lost a building, he never lost a property. He has these great stories about literally going and sleeping in the stockroom and helping his tenants in an early property pay the rent and sort things out because the bank was going to take the property back from him. He's just got great stories like that. But then you see the shadow side of it. He was so protective of anything because of what happened to him as a child that when he married his college sweetheart, he was the exact same way. He kept being more and more fearful that something was going to happen to her. He was waiting for the shoe to drop. Initially, he started making some more money and they put in a house security system, and then he's making more money and sort of getting more headlines and he's getting more worried. So he puts trackers on her cars and her cell phone. And then he becomes a billionaire and is in the paper a lot. And he hires security guards and bodyguards to stay with her all day. And of course, you can imagine what happened. He ended up having the exact opposite of what he wanted, which was protecting and making sure he'd never lose his wife. He ended up smothering her and not realizing really why he was doing it. He never thought she was cheating or anything like that. He just never wanted to lose her, never wanted to have anything happen to her. So it was that shadow side of the motivation. Part of it was great and served him well, and then part of it ruined his life.

And that highlights something about the hidden fear, is that people have an idea of fear and they think it is, you know, I'm shaky inside and I'm. And I'm going to run from something. And fear can manifest in so many different ways than that. And it can manifest as ambition or a desire to control something, or a hardness inside or even an aggression or an attacking energy that we might feel anger. And then I'm not scared, I'm angry, I'm pissed. And actually there's a lot of, of that fear underneath. Okay. There's so many threads that you're opening up that are so fascinating. I want to make sure that we keep moving forward because we've got to get to fear as fuel. And how do we use it in this fear frontier. I want to explore that. I also want to talk more about how the fear in this current climate and your perspectives on that. So both of those. But before that, let's hear about that experience, the near death experience you had.

Yeah, so all I was caring about at the time was making money. And I had started a couple of tech companies, raised about $50 million in venture capital. I was terrified all the time. I should have been having the time of my life. I was driving around in $150,000 cars, wearing $10,000 suits. Now this is literally at a $5 million startup. So I'm thinking I'm friggin Gordon Gekko just to try and keep the facade up that Nothing was wrong. And the whole time, in reality, I was terrified. I was afraid that we were going to lose our top employees. I was scared that our best customers were going to find a better deal someplace, rather than use my board, which now I've invested in 30 startups and helped some of the boards. But now I look at a board in a much different way. But back then I would spend a week just preparing for a board meeting so I look good. It wasn't about getting the collective wisdom of the board, which is what a board is there for, but it was rather trying to make myself look good because I was afraid all the time. And this is analogous to what's going on with a lot of people now. Dr. Aziz with the coronavirus, because I was afraid all the time. My body was creating this fear cocktail. When we have a reaction that you talked about, when you all of a sudden feel scared or you feel fear, that's a lot of that cocktail getting pushed out into your body by a little gland at the base of your brain called the amygdala. That amygdala is running a 2 million year old piece of software that was a warning system for danger. Danger might have been getting rejected from the tribe or not finding a mate, or looking less like a quality mate than another person. So embarrassment. So all of those things would create that reaction. What I was having was this fear of failure, fear of insignificance, fear of abandonment and rejection constantly. So that spigot that was shooting out that fear cocktail and it's adrenaline and DHEA and cortisol and other enzymes, it's going through your body and when you have that low level of cortisol, a lot of people know that is the stress hormone. It starts to eat away at your insides, just like acid eating away at lead. That's what was happening to me. I was dealing with it the only way I knew how, by drinking. I'd have six to eight beers or cocktails every night at a venture capital event or a networking event or charity event or whatever it was, it didn't matter. I'd find an excuse to start drinking around 5 o', clock, then end up going home at midnight for a couple hours of teeth grinding sleep, feel guilty about it, which is an Irish Catholic thing, then wake up in the morning, go to the gym to sweat it out. One morning I woke up, went to the gym, started doing pull ups and my arm was just in a ton of pain. I thought I must have pulled a muscle or strained a tendon. I started doing cardio and then I figured, it'll be fine. Go back to my normal routine. Next day, I woke up and the arm was really hurting. It was red and swollen and angry. I said I should go to the doctor, but I was too afraid to. I didn't want to hear what he might tell me. By the time the third day rolls around, I couldn't even move the arm, had to go to the doctor. And they said, it looks like staph infection, which is pretty common with guys who go to the gym. We're going to give you some antibiotics, take a blood test, and the nurse will call you back in the afternoon. As you probably know, the nurse didn't. The doctor did. And that was the single phone call that changed my life. That's when he told me, we don't know what it is, but you have no immune system, and you're under attack by a staph infection. We don't have the capability to deal with it here in Reston Hospital. We want to send you up to Johns Hopkins, and it's the best hospital in the world, and they can sort you out up there. Long story short, when I got up to Johns Hopkins, they basically said, are your affairs in order? Because we're not sure there's anything we can do for you. My daughter was a year old. My wife was six months pregnant. And that's when I came face to face with the realization that I had completely wasted my life. And I had all these amazing opportunities, and I was only motivated by fear and shame and guilt and regret. And I never made decisions based on opportunity and excitement and happiness and fulfillment.

Did you have clarity in that moment of. Was it the regret of having lived in those emotional states of fear and guilt, more of your life than you would have wanted? Or was it also. Did you have clarity of, like, oh, if I'd been choosing, if I'd been able to be more free or open, then I would have done A, B, and C. Did you see a whole different life path you would have chosen?

I wouldn't say a whole different life path, but it was definitely. I just had this tremendous sadness. So my biggest fear was flying. I saw an accident on TV, a plane crash when I was 7 years old, and that stuck with me. That created my fear frontier. I made up every excuse you could possibly imagine not to fly. Whether it was spring break or exchange programs or training opportunities or whatever. I would either drive, take a train, or make up some excuse not to go. Even one of the happiest days of my life. Very few Americans have rode the single skull in the World Cup. I got the opportunity to do that for three years in a row. When I found out about it the first time my coach called me, I should have been absolutely thrilled. But instead I was having a huge fear reaction on the other end of the phone. My body was just going apoplectic at the thought that I'd have to fly, I'd have to go to Europe to compete in the World Cup. I looked back on that and I look back on spring break that I missed or I look back on family reunions and Ireland I should have done. And I thought, I can't believe I'm about to die now from some stupid disease. And I missed out on all those opportunities. It wasn't a clarity of a different path. It was just a tremendous regret for worrying and being so fearful. I look back on my first company and I realized, God, I was just acting. Every time that early warning system went off with the amygdala and trying to tell me that there's a threat to my life or there's a threat to procreation, I listened to it. That's a 2 million year old piece of software in our brain that has no place in today's world. And that's what I see a lot of people doing now is having that low level of cortisol still coursing through their brains. Because they're locked in their homes, they can't have a normal life. They're terrified of what will happen and ironically that's going to eat away at their immune system as well.

Yeah, and I mean it's such a powerful, even as you're telling the story and it's through your own experience and we, you know, the listeners and myself are being graced to be able to get the, receive the message from the story, you know, as you lived it. But it reminds me of this, you know, this. I don't know who originally said it, but you know, you can't get out of life alive. And we're, I think when we're very fearful, we're trying to minimize damage all the way through to the very end. And then you had this window of like, wait, the end could be now, right now. And wow, I mean, I was gonna die anyway. The whole time I was gonna die anyway. And then here I didn't get on a plane, you know, because. Yeah, so you had this profound regret and I'm sure so many other feelings that emerged and somehow obviously you persevered and you did not die and you got through to the other side of it.

I did some of it, interestingly enough, an interesting anecdote. And this is really my whole chapter six in Fear is Fuel. My mental training that I learned at the Olympic Training center definitely helped me recover. I sat there doing mental training every waking moment when they said they didn't think there was anything to do. That's just a little aside.

Did you do visualization of health or what?

It did tons of visualization. And in fact, I'd get myself. I got to the point where I could literally get in a hypnotic suggestive state within about 30 seconds. And then I just imagine these warrior cells coming out of my sternum and going out and blasting away at those rogue T cells that had mutated and that were attacking all my other white blood cells and, you know, just like playing a Call of Duty and blasting away at zombies. And so I sat there every waking moment, you know, if I wasn't talking to my wife or something, just imagining that happen. And I think that had a tremendous impact. And, you know, also prayed a lot and, you know, reflected a lot. And actually, you know, it's interesting, made a ton of changes after I got out with everything from diet to exercise. And that's probably a whole nother podcast, Dr. Aziz. But what immediately happened the first day I got out was I walked out and Johns Hopkins is in kind of a crummy rundown area of Baltimore. And it was a gray November day. I walked out and I saw this leaf in a puddle. It was bright red and changed around the the edges with orange and these orange veins running through it. I said to my wife, I said, I know this sounds really corny, but that's like one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. And I just wanted to stop and look at it. The old me that I thought had died in the hospital kind of crept up and said, look, you lost an employee, you're going to lose that contract. Get your ass together, you've got to get back to working. Heads down. I just, I said, no, I'm going to ignore that 2 million year old piece of software that's trying to send that terror alert. And I'm just going to be grateful for being alive and be grateful for spending time with my wife and be grateful for this beautiful one year old daughter I had. The gratitude was the almost immediate thing that happened. And from that gratitude and that realization, I decided I was going to choose courage because I saw what the end looked like if I didn't. When I chose courage, the first thing I did was I said to my wife, I had to stay in my house for about six weeks while my immune system built back up. I said to my wife, I'm going to go take flying lessons as soon as I can get out of the house. I said, I don't care if I'm kicking and screaming with every flight, but I'm going to get my private pilot's license and get over this fear of flying. Because you and Shannon and our baby boy on the way deserve to see the world, and they deserve a daddy that will get on a plane and take him to Disney World or take him to Yosemite or show them the world. And I've got to be that guy. It was the choice to act courageous that helped reveal all of a sudden, within about six months, that that courage was my superpower, and I never knew it.

I love this. And there's a few distinctions I'd really love to get into around that amygdala, the habitual firing of danger, threat, respond right now. And there's kind of two responses, I think. Well, there's many, but there's two main ones in response to that fear surge. One is inhibit, right? Like, hold back, pull back, don't, you know, run away from the flight, don't get on the airplane. And then the other response that. What you're alluding to that came maybe in business for you, is it sends, like, something's going to happen with that contract, and it throws us into a flurry of action, often where we're like, okay, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, I'm going to do that.

I wouldn't say action, Dr. Aziz. I'd say reaction. Make sure we make that distinction.

Yes. Yeah. And it's. And it's usually a whole lot less effective than the action we might take. If that. That was not reactive, Right? That was. That was. That was more intelligently thought out, perhaps. So let's say someone is getting that fear. So the face your fear part, do the things that scare you. That one is clearer. What to do in a lot of cases, right? It's like, okay, get on the airplane. Or my listeners might be like, go into that conversation, ask that person out, like, you know how to do it and how to work with that. We can talk more about that. But, like, what to do is more clear when it comes to that kind of incessant, like, something bad's gonna happen. You gotta respond to that contract. You gotta do this thing. And I feel like so many people are living with that, that kind of ongoing surge of squirt of adrenaline and cortisol that's telling them something bad's gonna happen, better react, better reaction. And I've noticed this in myself sometimes when I'm like, you know what, there's nothing I need to do with that right now. It'll come back in and say, no, no, no, no, no, you didn't get the danger signal. You really need to pay attention right now. And it will kind of redouble its efforts. So I'm curious, how do you navigate that one?

So I'd say two things, One, very practical that I, you know, I certainly coach a lot of younger executives, particularly even, even, you know, some more successful CEO types on the Eisenhower matrix, which you've probably heard of that Stephen Covey made famous, that on the X axis is importance and on the Y axis is urgent urgency. We often are pulled to do what's urgent first without looking at the level of importance. I think if we can put things in those bucket what's important and urgent and do that first. What's important but not urgent, do those second and then leave everything else for when it comes. Just having that as a basic rule of thumb helps you delineate. Is this urgent because the phone keeps ringing or the press is saying bad things or whatever, or is it really urgent and also important? That helps, number one. But number two, I talk about that 2 million year old piece of software in your brain running on the amygdala. What most people don't know, and this is fascinating because we're born with a fully developed amygdala. Actually even before that, in the third trimester, the amygdala is fully developed in the brain and we come out with that fight, flight or freeze response. We have that capability to react to danger because it was survival. We don't get the prefrontal cortex, which is the intelligent adult supervision that sits at the front of our brain behind our forehead that's not fully developed until we're in our early 20s. We've got 20 years basically of fight, flight or freeze response, which has a huge play in parenting. We're populating our subconscious database which is what we make all our decisions with. Our default is always to defense. It's always to fight, flight or freeze to one of those reactions. And we practice that default for 20 years before we have something else that can challenge it. That's something else most people have never heard of. It's called the subgenial anterior cingulate cortex or the sgacc The SGACC is our courage center. That's where all the potential is. The potential for anything is in the present. It's not about what happened in the past. It's not things that we can pull out of our subconscious database. It's all in the present being right now, what's happening. To answer your question specifically, how do you take advantage of that? When you figure it out, what's important, what's urgent, the way to do it, really One of the easiest ways, and I lay out a platform in the book called the base method. B, A, S, E. The first B is breathing. That is by far the easiest way to dramatically change your life. Because the breathing, whenever you feel a fear response, is the first thing that disconnects the sympathetic nerve system from your brain. It gives you a break to be able to step back and say, okay, I don't have to react, I can think. If I make this decision, what's the second order decision I'll need to make what's the third order decision and look down a whole decision tree to figure out instead of just doing the knee jerk reaction. So the breathing. And I teach something called a 4x4, which is breathe in for a count of four, hold it for a count of four, breathe out for a count of four, hold it out for a count of four. The Navy Seals learn this at sniper training and they call it box breathing because you can think of each four seconds as going around the box. And that breathing can help you immediately in the moment. And there was a great study out of the University of Pittsburgh on mindfulness and meditation. And what they showed is just focusing on your breathing for 15 minutes a day. After three days, when they were doing brain scans, they saw an improved connection to the sgacc. Just three days of breathing can take that low level anxiety of you. So that's why I do, for my morning routine, I do some breathing and my bedtime routine, I do some breathing as well. That's the easiest and most effective way to combat any of those feelings and that anxiety and low level fear.

In your routine, do you do the box breathing or do you more mindful focus on the breath as a meditation?

In the morning, I do something called tummo breathing and something from Kundalini Yoga. So I've got a specific thing that I do for about 10 minutes that leads up to a very long breath hold at the end. I'll generally hold my breath between four and five minutes. Afterwards, once I've gotten a relaxed state and feel pretty good, then at night, I just do the box breathing in a position. Yoga is called a bound lotus. It's sitting cross legs with your arms crossed behind you. And then I just focus on the box breathing for about five minutes before I go to bed.

I love it. Thank you for sharing that. I think those details are always really helpful. Definitely for me and listeners, they can take little pieces from that. So we work with our breath in the moment to activate this area that's associated with courage, and that's the B. And then what are the other elements of base?

Sure, it would take a little while to go into, but I'll run through them real quickly. The A is to assess the situation. So normally when we get reactive, when we fall for that amygdala hijacking, we're like a race car driver sitting behind the wheel. The only thing we can see is what's happening to us and all the threats around us. We can't see the big picture. When you learn to assess the situation, it's kind of like a helicopter that's filming the whole race. You can see turns up ahead. You can see all the different cars. You can see where your car and your driver fits in in that scenario. So that's an important skill to be able to step back and assess the situation. The S is interesting and there's tons of science behind it. People can check out the book if they want to hear more about it, but it's to smile and shift your eyes. Smiling uses 42 muscles in your face that have a direct impact on the cortisol production. Emory University did a study where they were showing people horror films inside a functional MRI and scanning their brains. They didn't want to tell them to smile to see if it changed it, so they gave them a chopstick that they put in their mouth so they'd have to flex all the muscles in their face. And what they saw was an 80% reduction in cortisol. Wow.

I love that study, by the way. That's just. That's a trip. Do you imagine you're watching a horror film and an FMRI scene with a chopstick in your mouth?

Yeah.

It's brilliant, though. I mean, and it's such good information for us to have that. Yes, yes, I know. Thich Nhat Hanh is a big fan of the half smile as a way to really calm our nervous system. And then the eyes, is it eyes up, looking up?

No, it's shift the eyes. So what you're doing is basically mimicking rapid eye movement sleep, or REM sleep. Because when something happens to us during the day, we form two memories of everything. We form what's called a semantic memory, which is just the facts, kind of. With Dr. Z talking on a podcast, I've got a MacBook Pro. I've got two lights on in the room. It's snowing outside. Just the facts. Then we create and we pair with that an emotional memory. Hey, this is really fun. Super interesting guy. I'm curious about his audience. I'm really feeling grateful for doing this. Those two memories are formed in my mind already. When I go to sleep tonight. They're going to consolidate what's called memory consolidation into my internal database, really my subconscious. When they do that, my eyes will shift back and forth. They'll shift left to right, like I'm watching Chinese Olympic table tennis guys play a brutal match together. If we do that during the day, we can mimic that memory consolidation. And there's some interesting science behind that as well that I lay out in the book. But that's the. That's the shift in smile. And then the E is to eliminate the shortcuts. And that's the most difficult one. And it's also the most impactful one by far. What you're basically doing is the brain is so efficient that we only use half our hemisphere for most decisions. And we make between 75 and 80% of our decisions during the day, subconsciously. And we do that based on our database of information, or what neuroscientists call their prior beliefs. The really messed up thing, Dr. Z's, is that we didn't build that database. We didn't choose what language we speak. We didn't choose the color of our skin. We didn't choose how many siblings we have, the town we grew up in, where we went to school. But all those things create our subconscious design of what our tribe is. That's the thing that we base our shortcuts on. So the idea and what you want to do instead of just reading the book that's in your mind that basically someone else put there, is you want to rewrite that book, and you want to reprogram your mind. And the way you do that is with new experiences that every time you feel and you fall back onto a traditional emotion or a traditional behavior, you stop yourself, try and catch yourself in that decision. See if you're making a judgment about something, and then try and replace that judgment with curiosity. That's the. Eliminate the shortcuts. Stop using what's called valence. In the neuroscience world, where we. If something's bad. So basically that amygdala, that 2 million year old software just says, do I want to kill this person or do I want to mate with them? And that's the two decisions that the amygdala makes. We make judgments based on that. If they're in our tribe and their genetic line is different than ours, which means a healthier offspring, I want to mate with them. If they're from a different tribe and they don't look like me, then I probably want to kill them. If you can replace that very quick judgment, the right side of your brain handles the bad things from a valence perspective. The left side handles the good things. If you can replace that with curiosity and you say, hey, just because this person doesn't look like me, doesn't act like me, doesn't talk like me, what can I value about this person? Then you're lighting up the other hemisphere. You're literally using twice the brain power, opening up the blood brain barrier and recruiting more synapses and neurons and you're thinking smarter. That eliminating the shortcuts has a profound effect on literally after about a month of doing it, you immediately notice, you become more curious, you become more open to things. Then that drives creativity as well.

So much good stuff in here. Obviously, I highly recommend going deeper in the book. I can just hear that we're scratching the surface of what you've studied. I know you've dived into this for many years to compile this. What I love about your approach, which you detail more in the book, is everything that I've seen and worked with people for many years to really shift long standing patterns around how they relate to fear. Their perception of themselves is people are all looking for some. I want some insight. I want to have an aha moment where then, boom, I'm free forever. I'm exonerated from all the discomfort. And the truth is it's. Well, even if you do have an aha moment, it needs to be followed up with reconditioning of ourselves because these old patterns can formulate and they're a subconscious, as you're pointing out. So what I love about your method is it's very moment to moment and it is a process over time. But the beautiful thing is that if we do apply something over time, there's such a liberation. So I want to ask just maybe one or two more questions and then we'll conclude here. But the one thing that's happening right now collectively outside of the individual experiences we have is a large state of fear. Throughout the United States, a lot of the world. And people, many people might say, hey, it's warranted fear. This fear is good because it's making us take action to protect ourselves. And yet there seems to be a lot of, as other people might say, there's an excess of fear and we don't need so much fear to take effective action. Other people say that we're reacting like an elephant that's being accosted by a house cat and jumping off a cliff to avoid the cat. And so there's a whole range of opinions. And then we get into political perspectives. And I'm curious, day to day, someone's in their house, they're trying to figure out maybe they're working from home, whatever, and they want information about what's going on, they plug into the main news source. And then there's even more fear and activation. So how do we moment to moment? And maybe it is using these base strategies, but other thoughts you have about how we can navigate this particular time of a lot of fear in the world.

I'll give you a quick explanation why we've got all this fear. Our brains are prediction engines. So what we try to do at any point in time is to predict the outcome of a current event. Excuse me. The way we do that is by going to all those things in our database. The human mind, our subconscious, has a database that can store as much as 500 of the best MacBook Pros out there. So if you imagine 500 laptops stacked on top of each other, that's what's in our subconscious mind. The things that we put in there are called prior beliefs. So we take those prior beliefs and we use those to predict outcomes. If we can't make a prediction, we try and figure out what part of our senses do we need to incorporate to get more information so we can make a better or more accurate or in neuroscience world, a more precise prediction. So we look for precision based on our prior beliefs. When something's novel, for example, the novel coronavirus, it means it's just a fancy way of saying it's new and it's unknown. So when that happens, we can't predict the future. And when we can't predict the future and there's uncertainty or surprise, we produce something called free energy. And this free energy is really what fuels fear. So the key thing is that's what's happening in everyone's mind because we don't know what happens. And you can see it in people's face. I remember talking to my mom this morning and I was staying with them two weeks ago and then said, hey, I don't want to stay with you guys if I can't get back home. My wife and kids are 3,000 miles away. I said, I don't want to be the one infecting you guys. So I'm going to go back up to Boston and you guys stay down here and be safe. She was in this constant state of anxiety because of the unknown, because she was producing free energy. She called me this morning, she said, did you hear Tom Hanks and his wife are all better. You could just tell in her voice. That was another point of input that went into her database saying that, okay, somebody famous, someone she knows or at least knows of, got it, recovered from it and is fine. And so as we get more and more information about what this is like, about the 45 people last week that started testing the vaccine for it, about the new. What's that drug called? I can't remember the name of it, but it's a malaria drug that they're trying out with an HIV drug down at Australia, University of Australia. And so as we find out more and more of this stuff, we get more and more knowledgeable, we stop producing that free energy. But the key for anyone out there who's dealing with the day to day anxiety is to be able to shut off that spigot of free energy at will. You brought up a couple of points, Dr. Aziz, in trying to ignore all the news and everything else, because the news is looking for sensationalism. Obviously, social media is not only looking for sensationalism, it's a lot of fake news and a lot of bad information. When we get in a case of information overload, we can't handle it. The easy way for people out there to deal with it is to have a routine. I always say if you have a morning routine, that's probably one of the best things you can do. Start out your morning routine, number one, with gratitude. When you wake up in the morning, thank God, thank Buddha, thank Allah, thank the universe that you're alive. You get another chance to have a great day. Then do some sort of breathing where you're just focused on the breathing, whatever it is. It can be the tummo breathing, it can be the box breathing, it can be anything that you're comfortable with. But just spend a couple minutes only focusing on the breath. Then make sure if you're at home and you're working from home, you've got a routine. That routine might be make coffee, have breakfast, get A workout in, take a shower, whatever it is. But try and get in the point where you have some semblance of normality to fall back on. You don't want every day to be like a staycation that you might have had in the past years. You want to be able to follow your routine, get some things done and know you've accomplished some stuff. I think that sort of thing, especially limiting, like you said, limiting your access to social media and to news sites is really helpful. And then spending time catching up with people. I was just talking to a friend of mine, Peter Hurst, who's the dean of executive at Sloan School at mit. We were chatting back and forth online. He said, hey, let's get Skype up and have a virtual cocktail together after work this week we're doing virtual drinks on Thursday afternoon. And just staying in touch with people is another great way to do it.

Yeah, so much good advice there and great suggestions on how to work with it. From your understanding of fear, I wonder if maybe this is would have been the case no matter what time period. Maybe this is just a human thing, but I wonder about conditioning over time and if we're in a sense more prone to this level of fear because we have been so plugged into media and our screens and social media and I think so many people live a life of how much comfort can I get? And I don't want to do things that make me uncomfortable or scary. And I wonder in terms of like if the fear is something that we're able to be susceptible to just as much as the virus might be. Do you think there's something here for us to look at in our culture of how we are and some maybe wake up call.

Without a doubt, without a doubt. And I think a lot of good is going to come from this virus. Everything from how we interact and appreciate our normality life to vast increases in speed of vaccine delivery and everything else. I think one of the best things that could come from it would be a whole different change in parenting. We're now on our second generation of way overly protective parenting. And you see the results of it in huge suicide rate increases in the population under 24 years old. Because parents have stifled our kids ability to make decisions on their own, to be creative problem solvers, to figure out what to do in situations of boredom or alone time and that sort of thing. Because kids lives are so scheduled now. They're going from school to soccer practice to violin practice to Mandarin Chinese practice. And it's all laid out in schedule form and they don't have to think and they don't have to be creative. I think a big part of that, what we've lost is a lot of the coming of age traditions that we used to have, a lot of the challenges, because there's a certain percent who don't get through them. What we lost sight of everything from having the rope in gym class because some kid who was overweight couldn't get up it or maybe fell and twisted an ankle. And now they've taken him out of gym classes to give him trophies for 14th place and participation trophies. And you're just as good as the guy who won. So here's your trophy. Those things are a tremendous disservice for the millennial generation and then the following generation beyond that, because kids need an ability and this is a neuroscience perspective that they have to be able to figure out on their own problem solving. They have to figure out the difference between assertiveness and aggressiveness. They have to figure out how to deal with fearful situations and still be able to take action. And all of these things require that they're alone. All of these things require that they make these decisions on their own without parents either helping them along or holding the bicycle up for too long. That's one of the things. I don't know if we're going to come out of this better because of it, but I certainly hope so because kids just have no idea how to deal with anxiety. And then one of the things that happens, and it's really well proven, when you're socially interactive, you get more of the drug in your brain. That's the feel good drug, it's the hug drug. They call it oxytocin. We release that when we have social interactions. Now what happens when people try to have their social interactions online is you don't get that same release. While people might have a lot of friends online, if they're not interacting in person, playing a game or going to a movie or something like that, they're not getting that same response. That creates a much higher sense of anxiety and also has them not able to produce as much. It's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy that you produce more of that happiness drug when you're with more people and you're happier. That's why the blue zones, the areas around the world where people live over 100 years old, have so much social interaction at, you know, at all different generation levels. So I think, you know, if something like that can happen where kids get more challenged and start to face things on their Own coming out of that. That would be the best outcome we could ever have.

Yeah, man. I feel like we could have a four hour interview. I want to respect your time. One little last super quick question and then we'll hear more about how people can can go further because there's so much more that they can learn from you that oxytocin not getting released online. Do you know if there's any research about FaceTime video or any screen like Zoom where people are actually seeing each other's faces and facial reactions? Do you know anything about that?

I don't, but I'd love to find out. I'd love to hear if it's the medium or the interaction. One of the things, there's a neuroscientist at MIT called Earl Miller. Earl's a great guy and a lot of his research is in my book. He's the first person to really have found that. We used to think brainwaves were a byproduct of the neurons and the synapses firing and the action potential being used. If you don't know anything about neuroscience, you could think of it like exhaust coming from a car. So when the engine's running, there's exhaust, but the exhaust doesn't do anything. It just comes from the engine running. That's how up until two years ago, everyone thought of brain waves. Well, your neurons and synapses are firing, so there's going to be brainwave activity. He's proven it's just the opposite. So brainwave activity helps coordinate communication within your brain. It connects different areas of the brain, the limbic system, with the SGACC and that sort of thing. One of the things that I believe, and having seen it in SEAL teams that I've worked with, or having seen it in pro baseball teams that I've worked with, is there can be communication. The easy way to say it is telepathically. But the science approach would be that those brainwaves, those wireless signals can go not just in your own brain, but they can go to another person's brain. I wonder, to be more specific about the point, I wonder if those have some responsibility for releasing the oxycontin or oxytocin, sorry, the oxytocin in your brain. And wouldn't be able to do that over FaceTime or Skype or something like that.

Sure. I mean, it's such a fascinating line of research. And then there's that phenomenon that I think everyone has experienced of if you're in close proximity to someone, that sense of being able to get into that sync where you might be able to feel like you get more of them and you can pick up on the thinking. But then there's also that phenomenon or synchronicity experience where it's like you're thinking about someone from across the globe. And I think that stuff's so fascinating. Great, because we have our own experience. And then as time goes on and we get more sophisticated ways to measure this stuff, then more and more is illuminated, which kind of brings us all the way back to that leaf outside the hospital and that we're graced with a life in this mysterious, amazing, infinitely deep and complex universe that we can explore all the way up and all the way down and probably never get to the bottom of it. But, you know, the more we learn, the more empowered we can become. And I really love what you're teaching and how you're teaching it and how accessible you're making this. And I strongly encourage everyone listening to start with fear is fuel. And if people want to go so they can find that on Amazon. But if people want to go further and learn more about anything from you, what's the best place to find you online?

So pjsweeney.com is my website and on Instagram, I'm the Fear Guru or Twitter pjsweeney as well. Looking up the Fear Guru gets me in most places. I think I'd love to have people come sign up. We do a twice monthly blog or video from pjsweeney.com with some good information. Everything from. I think the most popular one I had was one I put out two weeks ago, which was how you can respond to coronavirus with boosting your immune system and a morning routine and a lot of the stuff we just talked about here and all sorts of good stuff there. I'd love to hear what you think about some of the things we did today and how you've put them to use and how they might have helped you. Because that's why I'm doing all this stuff is really to help millions of people learn to be courageous and confident. And I think that's how we get a really amazing new world is when we're not ruled by fear and politicians aren't able to use it against us or marketing campaigns can't use it against us. And we can all think calmly and confidently, just like you're trying to help people with Dr. Aziz. I love it.

Thank you again, Patrick.

You bet. Thank you. It was great talking to you and thank you all for your time and for listening.

That brings us to the end of our interview, but not quite the end of the episode, because there's one more thing that we gotta do. And you know what that is? Time for action. Action, action. It's time for your action step. So, so many different things you could take from this interview. You can obviously choose which one you want, but one specific action I'd highly recommend is to actually practice the box breathing that he talked about. You remember that in the interview, what the Navy SEALs do, the 4x4 breathing, or box breathing, as they call it, where you breathe in to a count of four, hold it for a count of four, breathe out for a count of four, hold that for a count of four, and then repeat. And I encourage you, as your action step, to set a timer on your phone or a watch for 5 minutes minimum and 10. Ideal to do just that. Nothing more. No distractions, no tv, just no music, no audiobook. Just five or ten minutes. Set a timer. You choose of that box breathing. Bring all your focus to your breath. Such a powerful exercise. And the reason I want you to do this is because knowing that we can calm our minds and our bodies through some sort of mindfulness practice does nothing. Knowing that does nothing in the moment. And what we need to do is we need to be able to do it. And when you do it and you feel it, then you're gonna get hooked and wanna do it more. Because here's the thing, when there's intense stuff going on, that's not the time to be like, I guess I'll try that box breathing for the first time ever. I mean, you actually wanna have a history or a practice of knowing how to use it, knowing how to calm yourself. So why not start today? Why not start right now? That's what I would encourage. Until we speak again, may I Have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome. Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Aziz. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free blogs, ebooks, and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com.