The Future of Mental Health: Using Virtual Reality to Help with Anxiety

Hi and welcome to how humans heal. I'm Dr. Donny Wilson and today I'm really excited to introduce you to Dr. Srini Pillay. He is the chief medical officer and co founder of a company, a digital therapeutics company called roulet. He's also a Harvard trained psychiatrist and the author of tinker dabble doodle try. Thank you so much for joining me today, Srini.

It's lovely to be with you, Donna. It's really. I know this is going to be a fun conversation.

Absolutely. Because I mean, the thing is, and the listeners know that I've had an interest in researching and writing about and helping people with the effects of stress, how humans are affected by stress and how we can help humans actually recover from those effects of stress. Whereas a lot of times in the conventional medical system, that's not really the direction it's going. It's really more aimed at maybe a pharmaceutical or maybe some of the conventional approaches. But I think more and more people are really coming out and saying there's gotta be some other ways to help myself navigate this life experience and have wellness experience wellness and experience inspiration. And this is why I'm really excited about this conversation with you. Because as a psychiatrist, you're known for pushing those boundaries and saying, hey, not only do I want to look at things differently, but I'm even looking at things differently for myself too, as a person and a practitioner. So tell us a little bit more. So people who are just getting to know you, tell us more about you as a person and why it is that you're doing this work.

I sort of think of myself as an integrationist. I value my training in medicine. I used to run the outpatient anxiety disorders program at mclean hospital, which is at Harvard, and Then also did 17 years of brain imaging research. And so as a result of that, I've been in the position where I can connect the science of what's going on in the brain with human psychology. And when I trained, I was fortunate enough to be trained in an era where psychology and psychiatry were taught in a pretty intense way. So it was not just throw medicine to people, it was cognitive therapy, it was interpersonal therapy, it was psychodynamic therapy. So I got to think about things in very broad ways. I like to say that I think a lot of my views are influenced by my spiritual practices, which involve both martinis and meditation. So I think eminem.

And I think that meditations revealed levels of consciousness to me that I would not have just known with just perceptual consciousness. But in the process, it's also made me understand that there are worlds beyond what we perceive. The core mainstream science is based on what you can see. If you can see it, I'm not talking about the biological sciences, then you believe it. But more than 60% of the world is not.

You know, there's dark energy, dark matter out there. So why would we only rely on what we can see in order to heal?

It's really a shortcoming, isn't it?

Yeah, because I think that our five senses are not the only way to understand the world. I think that we can be intuitive. I think that we can be self connected. I think that for me, treatment is the bottom rung of the ladder. Prevention is the intermediate rather. And really what I strive to do at roulet and with anybody that I've worked with is to help them reconnect with this more vital, flourishing life. Because I think life's not just about living longer, it's about healthy longevity. And healthy longevity, to a large extent has many factors that contribute to it that are not mainstream in medicine. For example, one of the top factors is positive relationships. Like, we know that loneliness can contribute to coronary calcification, to lowering immunity, but we don't really think about. I mean, how many people's doctors have said, well, what's the state of your relationship? Like, why wouldn't a primary care physician ask about relationships if they determine longevity to such an extent? And what I've done over the years is I started at a very basic level with cognitive strategies. So if someone said, you know, I'm super anxious, what do I do about this? The most basic things I want to do is I have some very practical things. So I have a mnemonic called circa, which I use to help people understand how they can move blood away from the flooded amygdala, which is processing anxiety and also processes other emotions.

For the rest of the brain and toward the prefrontal cortex. And so in circa, this first c stands for chunking, which is like when you're anxious, ask yourself, have I? Like when you get up on a Monday morning and you're like, oh, my God, I have five million things to do. This is really stressing me out. What do I do to say, well, don't just let your brain handle all of it. Say, what am I going to do now? What am I going to do, like, later? How do I chunk this out? Also ruthlessly prioritize. Tell yourself there's some stuff you have to get done, some stuff you'd like to get done, and then there's something you're probably not going to get to and then also delegate. So chunking is a way of reducing the stress on your brain. It's a way of helping you understand how things can become more manageable. Ignore. Mental chatter is simply mindfulness. So it's basically sitting in a chair, placing your attention on your breath and whatever your mind is doing, running about and creating all kinds of narratives, or what did I do last night? Why did I do this? Just keep your attention on your breath and if your mind wanders, bring it back to your breath as if it's a flashlight. And studies show that this decreases amygdala activation, but it also can help protect your gene. So as we get older, at the ends of our chromosomes, we have telomeres. Think of it like shoelaces, the plastic part at the end.

As you get older, the telomeres get shorter and shorter. Then you have illness and then you die. But mindfulness meditation can protect those telomeres and help you potentially live longer as well. Then there's the R in sukkah, which is reality check, which is this too shall pass. Sometimes something awful happens. There's no bright side. You have to remind your brain that it's not going to last forever. Like that was what it is. It's gone. And then control check, which is like the serenity prayer. What can I control? What can I not control? And to know the difference, because if you get up with 10 units of attention in your brain, let's say that are active and you occupy the first seven with the morning news, you only have three things, three rings of attention, and you can't really help yourself. So you want to be able to know what you can control and let go of that. Lady Gaga was a great person who I think spoke to this. When she said that, she started to get burnt out and she started to think, I don't really want to sing anymore. And when she started to think about why, what she said was she realized she was doing stuff she didn't want to do. She didn't want to take selfies, she didn't want to sell perfumes. And so she started to say no. And once she realized what she could control, this actually made her have much more self respect. And she was able to, as she said, I'd look in the mirror and I'd say, you I can go to bed with any night because you've got integrity. And then the last A is attention shift, which is, how do I stop just focusing on the problems and focus on potential solutions even if I don't know what they are. How do I make my mind ask that question? Like, okay, so I don't know how to get more money, but I'm going to start thinking about more money because that's where I want my mind to be. So chunking, ignore, mental chatter, reality check, control check and attention shift are five simple ways that you can use some cognitive strategy to change your brain. At rule A, one of the things we do is we're developing experiences that firstly, 70% of people in the world do not have access to mental health care. 50% cannot afford it. In the US we have 16 psychiatrists for every 100,000 people. That's one of the highest in the world. So the idea of having more online therapists, there just are not enough qualified people. Digital care, if you want to reach a billion people who need help, digital care is the only way to actually reach that number of people. So we're developing art experiences that are nature based, geometry or fractal art so that people can experience the healing impact of these short videos from 2 1/2 minutes to 10 minutes. And we're able to actually show at Mayo Clinic that we can statistically significantly improve anxiety, emotional distress and focus just by being in these videos. And you can watch these on the mobile phone, on a desktop computer, you can also, you can also watch this in a VR headset. But there you start immersing yourself in this 3D context. And I'm very hopeful that immersion through virtual reality will give us a western, different, non meditative sort of technology that will allow us to induce non ordinary states of consciousness. So if you look at studies, for example, on transcendental meditation, in the preliminary studies, what we see is that trans long term transcendental meditators can downregulate all 49 genes associated with inflammation. They can upregulate genes associated with immunity and oxygen carrying capacity. So if you can be in that state in VR, you can levitate, you can go through walls, you can do all kinds of things. Why wouldn't we actually utilize the metaverse or virtual reality to create these changes? And then the next level about sort of like what to do about stress is that I ask people to think about it a bit more deeply. Like what, what do you actually mean when you're stressed? Because you know, most of America is very fatigued right now. And if you ask yourself and what they're saying is taking time off is not helping because the antidote to stress is not Always lying on the couch or doing nothing. It's really to try to find something that engages, something that gives you a sense of vitality. And so I often would say to people, the opposite of stress and anxiety is not always calmness. Sometimes it's calmness, but a lot of times it's engagement, the excitement, it's vitality, it's interaction. So try to find what this vital place is. The problem with this is that, as Kierkegaard said, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. We say we want to be free, but we build walls and chains into our lives. From the very beginning, I'm attached to that. I can't go out. I can't do this. And then we lose our freedom. So rather than being anxious about our freedom, which feels like there's no gravity, you want to ask yourself more deeply, you know, why you're anxious or stressed. I also like this perspective of positive disintegration which Dabrowski concocted. And really what he said was that gifted students are always coming apart to put themselves together at a higher level. And one way you do this is you start asking yourself, what's the gap between what is and what I think should be my life? Because a lot of stress is caused. People have given up. Sometimes they've had ambitions as kids, and then you become an adult, and suddenly you're robbed of this ambition. But what if you could actually say anxiety is the cry of the self in the process of becoming? One of the psychoanalysts said, so what if this anxiety is a signal that actually you can reinvent yourself? You can look at a different part of yourself? You can realize that there's not one static self that exists in the world. To summarize it, I would say circa for cognitive techniques, rule A for using digital therapeutics by eye, philosophical constructs like why do I not want to be free? And then trying to ask yourself, how do I reconstitute myself and look for more vitality are some of the ways in which you can actually manage your stress.

Thank you so much. And I, in listening to you, I really see that.

You'Re helping people to see that they themselves are not necessarily right, not necessarily the thought of the anxiety or the anxiety itself. In everything you just said, you're describing here I am as the human in this vessel, in this experience, and I get to choose what. What pathway I'm going to go down or what experience I'm going to have. I mean, do you tell us more like, how? Because I think that sometimes that's where people might be starting from is just realizing, oh, you mean I have the ability to choose what my mind is going to be doing this morning or today?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, sometimes it feels sort of uncontrollable. And I think people. And the more you try to control it, the more anxious you get. But I think we do have the ability to choose and we do have the ability to say rather than trying. So a couple of tips there which I think are interesting about how the brain works if you try. So Daniel Wegner was a psychologist at Harvard who studied a process that he called ironic process theory. And what he said was, if you. The initial experiments were, I want you to think about whatever you want to think about, but do not think about a white bear.

They're like, how do I not think about a white bear? But some. They did all kinds of studies showing that actually in soccer players who are trying to score penalties, if you attach eye tracking devices to their eyes and they say, do not kick the ball to the right, the eye goes to the right immediately under stress. So the first tip is if you're trying not to be anxious, try to be calm or excited. Not. Not anxious. Because if you try to be not anxious, it can actually make you even more anxious.

It's like the word not like. I think it's like, even with hypnosis, this happens too. You know, the brain doesn't understand the word not, so it goes toward it.

Yeah, exactly.

That word.

Right. And so. And then the other thing which I think relates to what you just said is a body of research done by Ethan Cross and his colleagues who said, if you're trying to, you know, give yourself a pep talk, rather than my saying, I'm going to crush that, what you say is threeni, you're going to crush that. And that it's much more effective in building confidence. Now you might ask, well, what's the difference? Well, when you're anxious and you take and you say to your brain, I'm going to crush that, your brain's like, yeah, whatever. Like, you're anxious, like, you're not going to crush anything. But srini you're going to crush that. You realize that there's an anxious part of you, but there's also a courageous part of you. There's a loving part of you. There are many other parts of you that can help you crush that. And so helping yourself understand that you have the power to heal, you have the power to make that choice is important. But a lot of people don't Want to even believe in that power. You know, as Freud said, this is not a direct quote, but it's an interesting quote. He said, you know, neurotics complain about their anxiety, but try to take that away and they will hold onto it as if you're trying to take away their firstborn. So the question is, you know, researchers ask, well, why do worried people worry? It seems like they want to worry. Well, the number one theory on why people worry is called contrast avoidance theory, which teaches us that people who worry. So in life you have, you have these peak effects, you know, like birth of a child, you know, falling in love, getting a great job. And then you get these trough effects which are death of a loved one, breaking up or losing your job. Well, anxious people like to keep themselves in the miserable middle because they don't like to go from my life's amazing to something bad just happened. But if they're in the middle, the contrast is not as much. They're like, well, I wasn't that happy anyway. So when someone died, I was like, okay, it's a bad thing. But it wasn't like, oh my God, I just came from being ecstatic. So you have to remind yourself not to be afraid of the planes of existence where bliss lives. I think that my personal philosophy is that fundamental human nature is our most fundamental nature is bliss.

There's a belief system in Hinduism which I particularly enjoy, which is, which is called Satchit Ananda, which is being consciousness. Less is your fundamental nature when you are worried or thinking about things. Yeah, of course you can always rationalize, I need more money. I don't like, I don't want to go out to this occasion. But if you, if you land with the fact that your nature is bliss and you are betraying yourself when you become this other thing. That's a technique that I use myself where I always think, I worry sometimes and I get so caught up in these loops of thinking and then I'll say to myself, wait a minute, you know that that's not what fundamental nature is because you know a lot of people through many forms of consciousness. If you look at the therapeutic impact of psychedelics, if you look at the therapeutic impact of meditation, people realize when they're in those states it's not the psychedelic that carries the, this experience of bliss. The psychedelic is acting on the brain tissue and it's inherent in you.

We already have that capability. It's just sort of blossoming, opening it up, opening it up.

So to the extent that you can do that safely and to the extent that you can explore and ask questions and set an intention, we know that this capability for bliss exists in us. If you have this great meditative experience, you're like, wow, this is amazing. For me, I don't know what this is about, but recently, sunrises and sunsets have really caught my attention.

I've been like, love them. Love it. The colors, the. It's like you can have such a. Our nervous system, I think, so much response to nature, to colors, to the temporality of it, you know, it is. It's amazing.

Yeah. And I would also say that it's important to choose. What do you want? You know, when you look at intrinsic motivation, like, how do I feel? Like jazz. How do I feel like, you know, this is, like, this is amazing. Well, the leading theory on that, which is called self determination theory, teaches us that in order to feel intrinsically motivated, which immediately combats your stress. But to feel intrinsically motivated, there are. There are. There are a few things, three things that you need to do. The first is autonomy. How much autonomy do you have in your life? Can you call the shots a little bit more in your life? There's always a place where you can do that. You can decide to exercise, you can decide what you want to eat, and it's different in different cases. I really don't believe in a lot of traditional medical research the way that people do. I believe in research, and I believe we should continue to ask questions. But I believe a lot of the questions that exist in research.

Are just not being asked in the way that people need to ask them. So the other day I had a neighbor to text a bunch of people saying, hey, the Cowboys are playing the Packers. Do you want to come over and watch the game? And so I go over. I'm thinking, it's good. I've been good at my diet so far. I'm thinking, so I go over and watch. It's like White Castle burgers, pigs in a blanket, and pretzels with liquid cheese. And I'm like, well, do I like these things? I love them. I think they're delicious. But what am I going to do today? I said, well, I'll do that, and then I'll compensate for that by being deliberate and conscious on another day. And so I didn't want to stress myself out when I was eating because that just adds to the negative impact. And what you eat is not an objective delivery system. Deepak Chopra put in an early study recently where he talks about the fact that they had fed these different groups of rabbits with these high cholesterol foods. And what they found was that there was one group of rabbits where the high cholesterol, cholesterol was sky high. And they're like, well, of course you give them all these cholesterol containing foods. But then they found there was a group of rabbits who the cholesterol was completely normal. And so the answer, what's going on there? They wanted to have different genes. And then they found out that in all the rabbits where the cholesterol is normal, the person who was feeding them was petting them. And so apparently this kind of comfort can actually, when you're being good to yourself, when you are feeling taken care of, which is the third factor in intrinsic motivation, social relations, then you actually, it can change your biochemistry. And the second factor there is competence. So it's autonomy, competence and social relations. Give myself more freedom. How do I do something that I'm good at, that I like, that I enjoy? And then how can I connect with people who I truly want to connect like my people? If you look at the Blue Zones diet, the Blue Zones programs, some of the most important factors for healthy longevity are around being around the right tribe. What's your tribe of people? And it's not the same for everyone. And part of the reason I said that I feel like mainstream research is not adequately looking at the findings in the studies. A couple of reasons. One is if you look at statins and cholesterol, for example, people's cholesterol, cholesterol is high. You go to a doctor, they're like, oh my God, your cholesterol's too high. Let's bring it down with a stat. Or these days, one of the best ways to predict cardiac outcome is apparently looking at your calcium score. So if your calcium score is too high, often doctors will prescribe statins to lower your cholesterol to protect your heart. Well, in a lot of studies, statins do lower cholesterol. But there have been a large number of studies that have been reported in meta analyses that show that in certain instances, when you lower LDL cholesterol, which is supposed to be good, people think, oh, that's great, but when you lower LDL cholesterol, you accelerate the path toward death. So how do you reconcile these things? It's hard to reconcile. And in December of last year in the New England Journal of Medicine, there was a really beautiful article that looked at the fundamental basis of medical statistics, something that we call the P value, which tells you how statistically significant a finding is. If it's less than 0.05, then we know it's probably significant. A treatment probably works. What they found was that P values are actually not that great. You cannot replicate a study even if the value is really low in the 0.005 range, the P value, you can only replicate a study 58% of the time. What does that mean? What does all this jargon mean? It means that you as a consumer of medical research, should look, I think, for evidence based treatments and approaches. But you should realize that this is not the holy grail and you have some space within which you can change the path of your own health. And I always say, you know people, one of the most understudied things in the world is placebo effect.

There was a study, for example, where they gave people three tubes of neutral pairs. So, and they were like, just apply it to your hand and see what it is. One they labeled lidocaine for pain relief. The other they labeled capsaicin, the active ingredient in chile. And then the third they labeled neutral. But this was all the same cream. When people took lidocaine for pain relief, they were like, wow, this feels really calm. Capsaicin. The one labeled capsaicin, they were like, ah, it stings a little. And neutral, they're like nothing happened. And when you look at it, when you looked at their brains, what you saw was that when you expect something positive, it lights up the reward centers in your brain. When you expect something negative, it activates the pain centers in your brain. So if you start your day with a positive expectation, which probably will increase dopamine, make you feel more jazzed and rewarded, it also increases opioids, so it allows you to feel more relaxed. Expectation, that is positive, changes your biology. And so the very first thing I would say to anyone is whenever you're not in a state of positive expectation, you're robbing yourself of a natural biochemical gift that you can give to yourself. It's funny, people are talking about all this. These kinds of dopamine diets don't reward yourself too much. I, I have a theory that a lot of people take whatever the rewards of guilt are, and then they apply it to very restrictive diets, very restrictive lifestyles. My personal view is that it's important to live to the fullest of one's capacity. And I don't know, part of the reason that I'm so sort of worried about things that are purely preventive is that when you're preventing a disease, you're thinking about the disease the whole day. And there have been studies that show that if you think about being afraid about getting ill, you're more likely to get ill, you're more likely to die. So why would you do that? Why not start the day with a full sense of motivation that you have some agency to change your life and your biochemistry and then ask yourself, what makes me feel more vital, what makes me feel more alive? And make that decision for yourself. It's the reason of all the different diets that exist, probably the one that most appeals to me is intuitive eating where you're not overly restricting or overly indulging. You're sort of saying to yourself, what do I want to do today? Yeah, well, I'm watching football and it's great to eat this kind of food and it gives me a right tribe effect. So now I'm hanging with a tribe and I'm feeling connected and that connection has positive effects on my physiology. Now if I ate that every day, it probably, I don't think it would be the right thing for me. But there are people who have been known to eat this kind of food for their whole lives until the 90s. I know a couple of people over a hundred. So I think Vera Wang recently was asked how she looked so fabulous at the age of 70 and she said that she attributed it to, I think it was hard work, vodka and it was some other kind of fast food. And you might be like, what do you mean? There's no one factor that determines longevity we have to question. But we know when we're doing something that it's probably not going to elevate our lives. So why not pay more attention to ourselves as we're evaluating all of this research that's out there.

Did you recently get an abnormal pap smear result and test positive for hpv? Then I'm glad to connect with you. I'm a naturopathic doctor and midwife and I specialize in helping women to address abnormal pap smears and get HPV to negative. And I would love to invite you to join me for a free online workshop. It's going to be a one day, two and a half hour workshop. I'd love for you to come and this way I can teach you what your PEP results mean and what are the steps you can take to help heal your cervix and get rid of HPV instead of just wait and see if it gets worse. So I look forward to seeing you at end the workshop. I love it and I, and I hear that it really, from what you're describing A lot of it is what are we putting our attention on? Right. Which is. I love that it comes back to your roots in, in using meditation. But it's. What are we paying. Where are we putting our attention into preventing an illness, which means we're putting our attention on the illness, or are we putting our attention on what we really want, which is feeling healthy and well, you know, are we putting our attention on, you know, getting to enjoy connection with others? And therefore we get the benefit of that, that feeling of connection. Right. So it's, it's stopping ourselves just enough to say, hey, where do I, where am I putting my attention? Just asking ourselves that, first of all. And what do I want to be putting my attention on? Because. And knowing and understanding, as you've described to us, like, because that's how our, our nervous system works. Like, it's like we, we. We don't. We get these human bodies when we're, we're born into them, but they don't come with an instruction manual. We don't, we don't. In school. We don't learn how the human nervous system works. So I love that you're. You're essentially teaching us. Listen, here's how the human nervous system works. And you. It's like driving a car. Once you know how to drive it, you can do it. You know, you can, you can choose. Oh, I want to put my attention on what I'm wanting to have more of in my life and not. Not what I don't want to have in my life. And I love that, that we can, we can, even by understanding the placebo effect, we can, we can get that. If I want more pain, I'm going to be putting my brain's focus on something this uncomfortable and painful.

Huh. Actually, recently you are saying that reminded me of a conversation I had recently with a pulmonologist from West Virginia. And, you know, as a pulmonologist, he's been studying lung fibrosis for most of his life. So I expected he was going to be pretty sort of into the body and everything, but in his conversation, he said to me, at some point when we got to know each other a little bit better, he said, so, who do you think you are? What do you think you are? And I said, well, what do you mean? He said, do you think you're your body? And I said, no.

My hunch is that there is something that we call spirit or consciousness or God that permeates the entire world. Permeates you. It permeates me. And it inhabits this body. And to the extent that we allow for vitality, the spirit fuels your thirst for life. But the moment you create the space, a home, that's unwelcoming. The spirit is like, okay, see you. Because I don't want to hang out here. And I think that's how illness and death come about. So. And he was like, yeah, I think so too, you know, and he was, you know, a white American doctor. So I was like, this is kind of an interesting perspective to have. But when I talked to him about this, he said.

So if you know this, why are you not studying? Like, why at medical school do we not teach an entire module on the nature of spirit, the nature of that which permeates the world? We can find ways to express this. We can talk about it in terms of dark energy, in terms of intuition, in terms of belief, faith, God. Why don't we debate these things? Why don't we try? And that really opened my eyes to the fact that I want to be really connected to.

Whatever this thing is. Because I feel like I've lived long enough to know that I have an intuition that it exists. I'm not somebody who wants someone to believe what I believe. Like, it's sort of like I want people to believe whatever they believe. But I'd like to share this in case it ignites an awareness, in case someone says, you know, who to write. Like, I don't feel like I'm just my body, you know, like when you dance, it's like such an amazing thing. When I play tennis, like I feel outside my body. And when you feel outside your body, you're not really aware of that. The body loses its existential weight. And so when we give up existential weight, we are filled with lightness. Which is why the movie the Unbearable Lightness of Being points to the fact that we often choose existential weight, worry, concern, prevention, body oriented things, rather than choosing lightness. Because lightness, whatever the spirit is, it is light. It invites you to a very different state of who you are. It's why I think, for me, one of my core philosophies in life is play. I think play is very healing. There's a lot of research to show that it in fact is. But people say, well, after all this brain research and what can you tell me? I said, well, you live, you die, you do something in between. Make it matter, make it matter on your terms. And if you're listening to experts and you're listening to people who studied this, that's great. It's A format of understanding, but it is not the Holy Grail. I mean, when you look at what people call miracles, medicine just dispels of miracles. It's like, well, that's an odd thing. It's 100 million chats. I was like, well, I actually had this discussion.

A few years ago with someone who was a former medical student of mine who called me because her father had a massive stroke and it occupied the ventricles. So the head of the ICU was a friend of mine who knew I was trying to support her. So he came to me and he said, listen, this is like, nothing's happening. You better ask the family to come in. I know they're worried. They want me to do something that there's nothing to do. Just ask them to come in and say their goodbyes. And I was like, I know her and how attached she is to her father. And no, I'm not going to just say that. I said, what is the chance of this man living for a few more years? He goes, well.

Probably one in a million. I said, great.

A million people.

That'S great. Let's do what we can to work. And then he goes, now, don't start. And I'm like, wait, no, I understand you gave up, but it's easier for you to give up than for her to give up. And she was an amazing medical student. So she talked to me, she said, I know we can do something here. I said, okay, but we're going to have to play good cop backup because the medical system will not tolerate two people fidgeting around every day being like, add this, increase that, decrease that. Anyway, he looked for.

We took a very obsessional stance for his health. He was able to ride a bicycle. He lived for probably four or five years more. I can't remember the exact number of years, but many more years. And it was proof to me that if something is a one in a million chance, then you should be that one person in a million. Because the exceptional can happen. Life can be rewarding. Life can be amazing. And even if it's not common, why not make that your life?

Now that's beautiful. And I think that sometimes that's all that people need to hear, is like, hey, why lean toward the, oh, it's never going to be me, Right. That's more in the impossibility. But if you're saying, hey, lean into the possibility. And then all of a sudden different opportunities present themselves.

Yeah, because, you know, possibility is an opening. It's basically, it's an opening for exploration and Curiosity. And it's an opening. Like, I feel like when I think about my health behaviors, there are some. Like this year I just added three more treadmill days. But last year, in my head, I thought, I don't have time. Like, I work out twice a week. I play tennis once a week. I'm not adding any cardio. Like, why did I add it? Because I felt like. And now that I'm doing it, I find it pretty impossible. This is a remarkable thing to say, but it's pretty impossible that I'm not going to maintain this. And if you ask me, well, and I'm not using effort.

I just feel I've heard something in my body, in my mind, and I feel like I want to. It's not a stress. Like, I. Like, I look forward to it and it's, you know, and I still sort of. I eat the way I was telling you. Like, I eat healthily what I think is healthy, you know, a lot of the time. But I'm also a little bit suspicious about the health conversations that people have. You know, for example, people will say, you should have vegetables because they're rich in antioxidants. And what antioxidants are, are things that exist in vegetables that, that can help you mop up toxic radicals and protect your cells. And that's great. And there are a lot of studies showing that antioxidants can actually help you. But there are also a lot of studies show, showing you that antioxidants can accelerate malignant progression. So if there is the beginning of a cancer in you, the antioxidant could make it grow faster. So then why would you just say to somebody, just eat more vegetables? I don't know. And you look at the research over the years, aside from the fact that you cannot replicate it because our statistical methods are pretty weak, what we know is that there was a time when everybody was like, you can have six drinks a night and it's probably cardio protective. Then people were like, no, no, no. Look at the blue zone study thing. In. In many of those zones, people drink two glasses of wine a night. But in one zone, they don't drink anyone. So how can you actually make it attribution? And then recently, people, people have been like, no, no, no, no wine, no alcohol. So over the course of my life, I've seen different recommendations for alcohol. I've seen different recommendations for psychedelics. I've seen different recommendations for diet. I've seen. And once you see like so many for backache. I remember when I was a Resident people were like, oh, you know, back surgery, like it's a way to go. Then it was like, back surgery is the worst. You know, there are, there are studies that show that certain kinds of knee, knee operations are actually equal to placebo. But it looks, the story sounds so convincing that you feel like, oh yeah, there's something in your joint, let me go aspirated and you'll be better. Well, when they did, like fake aspirations, same results. So can't really take the medical establishment as giving you foolproof data. I think it's a very valuable establishment. I think it's much better than not knowing anything at all. And I want to. My personal passion is to really start thinking about personalization. How do we stop these group studies and how do I figure out for you what's best? Because for one person I think Brussels sprouts would be amazing. Another person, what if it stresses you out? What if you don't like it? For one person, burgers could be amazing. For another person it could be horrible. But if you can learn over the course of your life, I think medicine will shift. We sell related corporations right now to enhance well being because we are doing traditional forms of evidence based well being. But what we want to do is provide a first point of care so that you have something to do on your own. If you look at the weak times right now globally for traditional healthcare, they're absurd. You can wait up to a month to see a primary care physician, up to three months to see a psychiatrist in England in the National Health Service. Do you know how long you have to wait if you want an ADHD assessment, you have to wait for three years. So if your nine year old is jumping, is bouncing off the walls, you have to wait until they're 12. That's just absurd.

It's so terrible.

So what we feel is we want to develop a place where people can enjoy these experiences, can feel a greater sense of vitality. And we wanted to be able to say here's something that you can personalize over time, the system. Like how YouTube knows what videos to deliver to you. Why should these brain based videos or science based videos help you say, this is, this is what you want, this is good for you. I think AI is, is. That's one of the biggest positivity of machine learning and artificial intelligence. It's the ability to personalize medical recommendations so you can know what's good for you and not just, you know, basic group data.

No, it's so true because like what you're saying is that we, we tend to either like hear one medical study and for today that's what everybody should do. And then a year later or five years later, it's different. So we have to realize like, that's not the way to do this. And at the same time it also doesn't work if we have just like a trendy diet where we say everybody should be following this because it doesn't work for everybody. We're individuals. And I agree with you. I, I really would love if research would, would focus more on the individual. What is, you know, what, what helps one person with high cortisol could be different for a different person with high cortisol. And certainly something would be different for someone who doesn't have high cortisol but has low cortisol. You know, we need to be looking at these things. But what you've created with relay, because I really want people to understand what you're describing here is it's an opportunity to first of all choose where you're putting your focus, right? You're saying, hey brain, I want to focus on this because it's what you're looking at literally with your eyes. Whether you're looking at a phone, on an app or in a, in a virtual reality device, you're saying, I want to focus on this. And what you're using is you're using AI to then determine what should that person be looking at that's going to help them heal, that's going to help calm their nervous system or reset their nervous system or. Tell me more, tell me more. How does that, like, what are you seeing in terms of, and how are you deciding what should, what should be in that person's virtual reality?

Well, what we've created is we design all of them based on scientific criteria. So I go through all of the research looking at what the therapeutic effects of fractal art could be through the lens of psychedelics. How does geometry impact well being? How does nature impact wellbeing? And then I come up with a set of criteria that, and then, and then we construct the art based on those criteria. And then if you tell me you like a particular piece of art, then I know what criteria work for you like. So for example, in our nature based channels, you have an option to choose something to decrease your overwhelm, to decrease your worry, to help you focus, to relax your body, to allow you to escape paralytic fear, to develop a sense of hope, or to just be, to have your breath taken away by all. And so if you tell me you like that and you give me a thumbs up, then I know that that's what will make you feel better. If you don't like it, then I register that as well. And with AI, we can do some pretty amazing things in terms of, you know, deducing who people are. Like, if you told me I'm easily overwhelmed, I will assume that you take on, you bite off more than you can chew. You're, you're an earnest person who probably wants to do the most they can. You are not able to compartmentalize your work. And then, but, and then you can tell me, yeah, that's right, that's right, that's wrong. And so I get to know you based on your feedback. It's not sort of being all knowing. And a lot of people think the self circuitry in the brain is static, but it's not. There's a term that I coined called psychological hallowedism, which is a term that was based on a study that showed that if you're trying to solve a creative problem, you are statistically significantly more likely to do that. If you take on the identity of an eccentric poet rather than a rigid librarian. Now you might be like, what do you mean? It's like, well, if you just behave in this eccentric way, your brain goes to different places than the rigid librarian personality. Of course not all poets are eccentric and not all librarians are rigid. But if you take that as an example, what it's teaching us is that we're not solving the problems we want to solve because we're not thinking, taking on the personality of that person. It's like, you want to make a million dollars, you want to make more money. Well, be that person.

Don't wait to become that person. Be that person now. And if you can be that person now, now you're actually embodying who that person is. And you understand that as a human, a person who is already a millionaire will behave like a millionaire person who's already a billionaire will behave like a billionaire. Whereas if you are trying to become something, you're always trying to become that. And there's a gap. So the only thing between anything that you are, anything that you want is the fact that you're not willing to become that nut. And so I would say to anyone, if you want to be healthier, be the healthy person today. And that doesn't mean force yourself to do that, be the healthy person who will make their own decisions about what they want to eat. So I feel like this notion of.

Identity is central to well being because the self circuits can change with psychedelic research. One of the things that we know is that they create entropy in the circuits in the brain that are connected to what the self is. All of a sudden you're reorganizing your perception of the world because your self has been altered. And so if we can know that the self circuits can be altered, it's a really powerful thing to be able to heal. And there are people, when you look at the anecdotal results in people like Joe Dispenza, for example, where he's. People who've had advanced cancers, something like get better people can't walk and suddenly walk like medicine throws those examples away because they're like, well, that's not common. You know why it's not common? Because it's not common medical practice to believe. And so if you can believe that you can heal yourself, that's the first step to then embodying that potential as a healer. People often turn to gurus and they turn to all kinds of other people. But in fact, I often think that they. The reason they're doing, they don't even realize they're doing this is they know that that guru resides in them. And so they're like, they're feeling identified. They listen to the person. What I would say is try listening to yourself. Try listening to yourself because the self is incredibly wise and it has. The wisdom can be felt when you listen to yourself because it's coming from you.

Beautiful. Oh my gosh, that's so amazing. And I want to point out, I mean, I love how you're. You're bringing these concepts and using technology, using virtual reality, AI, which some people's biggest fear is that things like virtual reality and AI will cause us to lose ourselves. Or there is that potential that someone could use those technologies in a negative way. They could lead them away from themselves. Yes, but you're saying, hey, these technologies exist. Let's use them to help us toward ourselves and to heal ourselves.

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, in our Mayo Clinic study, we also showed people that was on a flat screen on an iPad, and they were able to significantly reduce their anxiety. So, you know, there's a. I think we must be careful about technology. I think we must figure out how much we want to use it. But I don't think we need to be paranoid about it.

I think we have to be careful and sort of think to ourselves and also try it out for yourself. I was fundamentally, I was much more of a humanist. I wasn't a techie person. The Reason I've just become so absorbed by it is that I see the capacity for the enhancement of human life. And I think if you can use technology for that, you can be like what used to take us like four months to make a simple video we cannot do in an hour. Why wouldn't I do that? You know, it's a. So technology, like everything in life, technology.

Is an interesting phenomenon. And I think all things that are reached with the conscious mind will have the limit of contradiction. You know, I actually explained this to somebody yesterday who was saying something well, I don't like. She was Catholic, broad raised Catholic. And she said, I don't like fundamental Catholicism because the whole idea that I'm a sinner, I don't need to feel bad about myself. And I said, well, I read the Bible, I think it's pretty amazing. I actually think I am a sinner in this construct. And she said, well, what do you mean? I said, well, if you asked me what would I feel like if somebody invaded America, I would be like, I'd be afraid, I'd be pissed, I'd be angry. And so I said, but by the same token, if you ask me what do I think about people invading a land where they're Native American, it's like, well, I don't like that, but I do like the results of living in modern times. It's a contradiction. Whatever the sinning is, is intrinsic to who we are. And if we stay in the logical plane, we will always be there. So for me, what's helpful about knowing about the sinningness is to say, well, surrender means you find a way to elevate your consciousness onto a plane where you no longer need to rely on logic. Because logic in my mind almost always leads to contradiction.

No matter what, you just end up right back there again.

Right?

And some people, I think, get stuck in that, in a battle and they don't realize that's the battle they're in. And you're saying, hey, it doesn't have to be that. We don't have to be stuck in that logical contradiction.

Yeah, I think logic is not the only way to make sense of life. Just think about a beautiful flower that moves you the next time and ask yourself whether what happened was only logical. Or maybe there's a subjective part to your existence that deserves to be recognized. And of sense making for me is more about exploration, it's about way finding. It's about figuring out how to live life like the curious person that you were born to be. You know, babies, when they're when they're learning how to walk, they're not like, well, I'm not gonna. I'm gonna Harvard. I wanna, like, you know, give me an instruction manual. They're just, like, pulling at stuff and they go, how do I do this? And they try to. They figure it out. And then we forget that we have this innate intelligence. When we get older, we're like, no, no, no, you got to give me an instruction man. You don't always need an instruction man. Sometimes you can figure it out. And I think most people are brilliant in that way because most people learn how to walk without an instruction man. They learn how to walk. And babies don't argue about whether they're going to Harvard to learn how to walk. They're like, I learned to walk in my own car. And so I think, remember your innate intelligence, because you've really silenced that. And you want to allow yourself to take advantage of who you are, of all that you are.

I love that. That's so beautiful. And what a great way to come to a conclusion of this conversation to just really inspire people back to themselves and back to their innate capability to heal and to learn and to create change. If they're wanting to create change. Right.

Yeah. In my last book, Tinker dabble doodle try, that's what that book's about. It's about learning how to unfocus strategically so you can connect more deeply with who you are and allow your intelligence to not just be logic. Intelligence is also a margin. Einstein said his discovery was the musical perception. So wait on your intelligence and you will have the greatest gift you could possibly have.

Beautiful. Oh, my goodness. Well, thank you so much again for joining me today. I'm really looking forward to being able to share this with everyone and get their comments and questions, and I'll definitely share where they can connect with you more and find out about roulet and. And your books. And. Is there anything else you wanted to share before we go?

No, just that I would like to spread goodwill and faith to everyone who's listening to this, and I thank you for bringing attention to these matters. Thank you very much.

Oh, you're welcome. It's to me again. I mean, the name of this podcast is how humans heal. It's really my passion to explore all the possibilities of what. What are the people who are thinking about humans and how human existence and how humans can heal? What are. What are they? What are we coming up with? And so I love to have you here for people to see. Wow, there are doctors who are coming up with things outside of what you might be hearing in the standard approach and thinking it through from a broader perspective and saying, hey, it's not just about.

Canceling out something else or throwing it all out. It's about saying, hey, how can we look at this in another way and encompass everything and really in some way problem solve that, that it becomes a real solution for people and real solution in a way, like you said at the beginning, in terms of aiming for wellness.

And what we would like to experience in our lives.

Yeah, absolutely. I always say to people that the aim of life is not to live a slightly less lame life, it's to live a kick ass life. And so you can do that.

I think life feels like it's worth it.

I agree with you. I agree with you. Oh my gosh. I look forward to staying in touch and thanks everyone again for listening in today at How Humans Heal. And please join me for the next episode. I'll see you soon.

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