STOP Brain Fog: Rethink Your Breathing Now!

There are a lot of sources of brain fog. The most obvious one would be a poor night's sleep. Sleep, of course, being the most fundamental layer of mental and physical health. You don't sleep well for one night, you're probably okay. For two nights, you start to fall apart. Three, four nights, you're really a degraded version of yourself in every aspect. Emotionality is off, ability to do most anything is off, hormones start suffering. So sleep is, is fundamental. But assuming that you slept well, there are a number of things. One is your breathing patterns. We often get into discussions of breathing, but this is a slightly different one than we've had in the past. A lot of people have sleep apnea. They are not getting enough oxygen during their sleep, or they are mouth breathing during sleep. These days, it's become popular in some circles to take a little bit of medical tape and tape the mouth shut and to learn to be a nasal breather. There is excellent evidence now that being a nasal breather most of the time, as long as you're not speaking or eating or exercising hard enough that you would need to breathe through your mouth, that it's it's beneficial to be a nasal breather for a couple of reasons. First of all, if you are deliberately nasal breathing during the day, the tendency is that you will nasal breathe at night, which tends to lead to less sleep apnea, less mouth breathing during the middle of the night, and less brain fog.

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Why brain fog? Well, during sleep a number of restorative processes occur, but if you're not getting enough oxygen into the system, the brain is literally becoming hypoxic, and a lot of the cleaning out mechanisms, the glymphatic system, etc., as they're called, don't get an opportunity to function as well as they ought to. So you wake up in the morning, you slept your normal 6 to 8 hours, but you're feeling kind of groggy and out of it. And of course, there could be other reasons that you're experiencing brain fog. Maybe, you know, for people that drink alcohol the night before, maybe they had alcohol. For people that maybe they ate a meal that was too large before sleep, maybe any number of reasons, right?

Gotcha.

But getting adequate oxygenation of the brain during sleep is key. So learn to be a nasal breather. And for those of you out there that say, well, I have a deviated septum, a lot of people think they have deviated septums. The problem is they're not nasal breathing enough. The sinuses actually can learn to dilate if you nasal breathe. Exercising while nasal breathing will kind of depend on the sport. Like, if you box, oftentimes there's the need to do a shh or, you know, kind of like exhale on impact type thing. So I don't think anyone should tamper with their normal breathing patterns as it relates to sport or singing or some, you know, activity. But what I'm talking about is when you're just standing around, when you're walking down the street, any low-level activity, you're working at your desk, yeah, you should be nasal breathing and breathing regularly. That will reduce brain fog in many cases.

Rule number 2: improve your stress response.

Exploring in humans is the extent to which people who can take on adaptive decisions, can take that adaptive behaviors, can take that stress response and kind of move the horizon in closer and just focus on, okay, I'm in a high-stress regime, this is really painful. We see this in— we work on people with generalized anxiety who are trying to overcome fear of heights, and just walking across a virtual height plank can be terrifying for them. But if they can get one step in front of the other despite high levels of anxiety, they can eventually overcome that. And so we've been looking at everything from how breathing affects the anxiety response to heart rate, pupil size, etc. I'd be happy to talk about all that in as much detail as you like, but I think the principle to take away is this: that the growth mindset is not about suppressing anxiety so that you're able to move, cruise through things with ease. That's just one part of it. It's really about trying to understand that stress response as key to your growth. It's absolutely key. And I think people that you know, lift weights or run long distance or are involved in competitive sports, they fundamentally understand this. But even they kind of migrate away from it over time where we— recovery is super important, but you need the stimulus, right? And the stimulus for growth is that stress response. And if you think about it evolutionarily, let's say we were all living in a little clan here in the Onnit offices and we didn't know anything about the outside world. We would start to kind of eventually what drove people to leave was they didn't have enough of what they needed. There's this sort of the seeking, right? So if you had enough everything, you had enough mates, enough food, enough water, be fine. But at some point there was some deprivation. And so we had to do a risk-benefit analysis. And so it was really about taking that anxiety and venturing out into the unknown to find resources. Some people died and some people succeeded and they were rewarded. And with that reward came the idea that, ah, there's something about looking out into the environment that's useful that can allow me to have more than I have in the moment. But you can't divorce yourself from the anxiety of wondering whether or not things are going to turn out okay. You can't divorce yourself from the anxiety of strain and effort. There's just simply no way. And in fact, you weren't really designed to do it. So to kind of peel this around to a practical answer, because often listeners and people want to know, well, what do I do with this? Is I think the field of wellness and biohacking and high performance is great, but it lacks definition. So one thing I'd really like to see more of in these communities and in the scientific community for that matter is more careful definition. Like, what is mindfulness? Like, really, what are we really talking about? What is stress? And what are stress mitigation processes that are useful? So one thing I think is really useful is think about real-time tools versus offline tools. I believe personally that everybody, whether or not they're MMA fighter, they're into CrossFit, they're running ultras, or they're a student in class that doesn't do anything physical, whatever it is, has 4 tools. One tool to get you to mitigate your stress response in real time. So let's say the stress response hits. You need to keep it— you can't let it go too high or too low. You know, you don't want to suppress it, but something to do that. You also probably want an offline tool that allows you to raise your ceiling on what stress feels like. You know, I'm buds with Wim, and I've known him for a long time. And like, you know, I think Wim Hof breathing is in particular is a useful tool for kind of shifting your perception of what stressful is. That's an offline tool. You can do it in real time, but you're not going to start Wim Hof huffing in the middle of your rolling jiu-jitsu because your breathing has got to be devoted to other things. So you need offline tools and real-time tools to cope with stress. And I think people need real-time tools and offline tools to bring themselves into heightened states of arousal. Right. So there are times when you're actually too low on the arousal plane, and the key is to get higher up there where you can access even better levels of performance. And so I think the so-called autonomic nervous system, it's absolutely under our control. It's a total misnomer. It's just that your heart rate and your breathing are taken care of on their own. You don't need to flip the on switch. You wake up every morning and if everything's going well, you're breathing and your heart rate is going the way it should. But you absolutely have levers that you can control and move in order to shift those. And I think that there's been a lot of focus on, like, okay, breathing is a great tool, or the ice bath is a great tool, but we really aren't thinking about what they're best for. and as a result of that, I don't think they'll ever evolve past where they are unless we start thinking, okay, like, what's the utility of breath holds? No one can tell me. Like, so my lab is very interested in, like, in trying to figure out what the utility of breath holds is. Is it better at letting you deal with adrenaline in your system? Is it better at get carbon dioxide tolerance? You know, um, for all the, the incredible tools that are out there, there isn't a lot of good information about systematic ways to approach it. And I don't want to peel everything down to, like, a really reductionist approach. You know, I'm friends with Brian McKenzie and guys, and Brian's about as reductionist as you get in the breathwork community, and I love how he loves to quantify everything. That's one of the things that initially brought us together as friends and as sort of informal collaborators. But I think that this world of biohacking needs definition. It's kind of ironic that in the weightlifting community, they've really worked things down to a kind of a fine science, whereas in the endurance community, It's kind of like whoever you're listening to seems to be the person who knows the most. And I don't claim to know everything or the most at all. I just would like to see sharper definition on all this stuff about stress, stress mitigation, ice baths, breathing, and so on.

Rule number 3, pursue challenges.

The discovery of growth mindset is worth thinking about. So Carol's discovery was these kids that for whatever reason, you know, liked doing math problems even though they knew they couldn't get the answers right. These were sure-fail problems. So it's the same kind of people that like doing puzzles, and these kids, not surprisingly, go on to do phenomenally well in a number of different areas of academic pursuit. But what's interesting about growth mindset is that it seems like there's some attachment of the reward systems of the brain to the action or the pursuit of a goal, not just achieving a goal. And when we step back and we look at what that really entails at a neurochemical level, we have reward systems in the brain. They generally fall into two categories. There are the reward systems that make you feel really good with kind of the here and now and everything that's within the confines of your skin and the things you already have, love of your dog, love of your spouse, gratitude for all the things you happen to have. And those are generally governed by the release of molecules like serotonin and oxytocin.

Okay?

But then there's another reward system, which is the one that drove a lot of human evolution, which is the dopamine reward system. Now dopamine is a very misunderstood molecule. It's often talked about only in the context of reward, like I'm going to work to this goal, I'm going to build my company, I'm going to get tenure as a professor, whatever it is, and you reach it and you get this dopamine reward. And indeed that's true, but what's often not discussed is that dopamine is secreted en route to reward. While you pursue rewards. Now, the ability to tap into that system, to subjectively amplify that pathway of reward in pursuit of goals is an absolute game changer when it comes to things like anything challenging of long duration or uncertainty or getting through this COVID pandemic situation. But, the amazing thing is, remember, the brain only does 5 things and we get to decide which of those sensations and perceptions have relevance and which ones don't, or which ones are attached to a goal and which ones aren't. So growth mindset in its purest form is the attachment of these reward systems to the effort process, to the friction process, and not just to obtaining a reward. And just as a kind of final point to that, there's a very well-known body of literature in neuroscience, at least among neuroscientists, that talks about something called reward prediction error. If you can dose the dopamine subjectively as you go through the pursuit of something and then have a lot of dopamine when you reach that thing, it's very likely that you're going to reinforce that circuit. There will be neuroplasticity and that circuit will become stronger, so the next time you will revisit those sets of behaviors. The opposite can happen too where you're in real anticipation of something, "This is going to be great. This is going to be great. This is going to be great," and then you reach that goal and it's kind of underwhelming. and that generally triggers this circuit that I referred to earlier, this kind of disappointment or pro-depressive circuit. So dopamine is involved in reward, but it's also involved in the pursuit of rewards. And so as you reach a milestone or as you tell yourself, "I'm on the right track, this friction I'm feeling, this late night, this early morning, this hard conversation with somebody that doesn't feel good, I'm going to tell myself this is for a larger purpose." That's that subjective insertion, that abstraction that we were talking about earlier. And when you start releasing dopamine to those kinds of things, there's essentially no limit on the number of things you can do or the energy to do them. So, just as a last, last point about dopamine, when we're in effort, we're always secreting adrenaline. We're always in pursuit, and it's draining. It's tiring. Dopamine has this beautiful capacity to buffer adrenaline. And you know this, you've experienced this before, because if you've ever been working really, really hard, maybe your team is depleted, everything's just a mess, and somebody cracks a joke, and all of a sudden, in an instant, it's like everything's reframed. That couldn't have been hormonal. Hormones work on the schedule of like hours to days to weeks. It had to be neurochemical. It absolutely had to be neurochemical, and that neurochemical is dopamine.

Rule number 4, keep goals in your mind.

We've all heard the sayings, you know, how do you, you know, journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Single step. Or how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Or, you know, there are all these sayings, and, and it goes back to the Bible and earlier, right? I mean, this is not new. These are not new sayings, but they're showing up in different forms. What's lost in those short descriptions, however, is that every step is not equivalent. If it were just that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, everyone would pursue their goals. Everyone would push back against adversity. Everyone— I mean, you Read the inspirational stories as many times as one needs, and I do think inspirational stories are very high value. In fact, I think they're vicarious dopamine. I think they give us the sense that we could, which then orients— hope— which then orients us to the world again.

Start. Yeah, yeah, maybe it's possible for me.

That's right.

So let's say, um, let's take the example of somebody who's, um, but just to finish that, that story of it's not about just taking a single step and one step at a time. Is it because there's adversities every 10 steps you go, and so it's harder and harder?

Well, it's just very nonlinear. You know, it's, it's some days go, you know, I know this from my scientific career, it's, you know, some days it's easy, some days hard, it's all over the place, right? So I think the thing to remember is that dopamine is this incredibly powerful molecule that allows us to buffer the effort process. It allows us to be in effort longer, and it allows us to actually eventually enjoy the process of effort and not think about the reward, but just say, oh, I'm enjoying the process, right? Well, you just described the first step. The first step in learning to attach dopamine to the effort process, which is the key operation in order to succeed, is to be very careful about how much you focus on the end goal. Keeping the goal in mind is important for like a proper orientation. You have to know the ultimate destination. But if at any point we were to evaluate our progress relative to that end goal, or if we don't know what the end goal is, there's a huge gap there, and it can feel overwhelming and depressing.

And I'm not good enough.

That's right.

I should just give up. What am I doing this for?

That's right. Those thoughts will affect us, and they're very realistic, right? I mean, as Carol will say and other people have said in the psychology field, you know, positive self-talk oftentimes, unless you do it correctly, you're badly wrong. You know, lying to yourself won't work. Saying, saying, I'm a winner, I'm a winner, I'm a winner, when you haven't lost or you haven't won yet is great, but that's not the most effective use of these systems.

Well, you're also being out of integrity with yourself. You're telling yourself a lie, right? You're like— and then you're losing your ability to have confidence because you're just lying to yourself, right?

And if it's really extreme, there's a name for it. It's called delusional, right? Right. And people will start to point that out, and then it becomes harder to to recruit people into your, your goals. So I think the key thing is to attach that sense of reward to the effort process. It's saying, look, I am oriented in the right direction, and rewarding the things you're not doing. I'm not back on my heels. I'm not just staying, you know, I'm bad in the morning. Yeah, a good example of this came to me recently. I have a good friend, he did 9 years in the SEAL Teams. His name is Pat Dossett. And, and we were talking about, you know, the Admiral McCraven thing, you know, get up and make your bed. And, you know, and they, they really do that. And then I think the way it was described was, um, you know, so at the end of the day, even if everything doesn't go well, your bed is still made. For me, that's not that big of a reward, frankly, right?

But I—

and so I said that, and I—

I love it though.

I make my bed.

Oh, I definitely make my bed in the morning. But I mean, going back and seeing that at the end of a hard day, it's not enough. I felt like there was something else there. So I asked him. He said, well, it's very interesting. Because part of it is about not just making your bed, but it's the things you're not doing by making your bed. You're not lying in bed and ruminating. You're not back on your heels.

And on your phone.

That's right. So when you look at, and you have spent a lot of time with people in high-performing communities, mainly through some consulting work, but what you find is that, you know, we can all either be back on our heels, flat-footed, or forward, center of mass. And when you look at people who are in these high-performing performance communities, they try and keep their center of mass forward almost through what seem like trivial things like making your bed or making the cup of coffee. But it's not just about what you're doing, it's all the things you're not doing that can put you down the path of ruminating or put you down the path of unhealthy behavior. So the key to this is, if we want to be very concrete, we should probably focus on actions. And I'll use fitness as an example because it translates to everybody, whereas because, you know, people's circumstances differ. Let's say somebody really wants to take on a fitness routine. They hate running or they want to lose weight in a healthy way, this kind of thing. So we've all heard the example, well, you put your shoes by the door on day 1. Day 2, you put them on. Day 3, you go out the door. Day 4, you walk around the block. And then, you know, and then eventually like they're running marathons.

Okay, great.

But to sustain that behavior or even to make the behavior pleasurable and to give you energy, the key is to subjectively reward those steps. So it's not going to be— let's say I go out and I run a mile and my goal is to run 10 miles in a few weeks. The key is, as you're in the strain of that mile, the hard part, you want to tell yourself, this is the good part, this is the part that gives me energy. And I'll be very surprised if people don't actually feel like they could continue further. So it's a journey of a thousand miles starts with the single— is made up of, you know, single steps. But the key is to reward the harder steps, not the easier ones, and not the ones where you get the thing that you want.

Don't reward yourself for putting your shoes on and taking a step outside.

You could if that was a huge barrier for you.

It was very hard.

It was very hard for you.

Running the 10 miles, that's hard.

Find the wall and push a little bit further through that wall and reward that process. So this is why I think reps in the gym, the final reps, like reps to failure, are usually not the best example. First of all, most people aren't doing reps to failure, and it doesn't translate to young kids and stuff where they probably shouldn't be doing heavy reps to failure, this kind of thing. What you want, however, is if you're going to go there, to think about these are the— this is the hard part, because that's when adrenaline, norepinephrine are getting maxed out, and that's when you have an opportunity to bring dopamine coming in and teach those neural pathways to slam that back down. And I don't want to, um, highlight them too much because they are a very niche and specialized community, but you look at people in special operations, you look at the, um, process, like the whole evaluation process of who gets in and who doesn't, it's really about putting people into stress and seeing who can not just make it through that stress but buffer that stress, reward the process through teamwork, reward the process of stress through some internal dialogue that has everything to do with not being back on your heels, not being flat-footed, but center of mass forward. And I should also be clear, I'm not talking about everybody being super aggro and always like, you know, work, work, work. Yeah, in fact, if you're spending too much epinephrine, if you're too much of an adrenaline junkie, you will burn out eventually unless you can find ways to recover yourself or to buffer that with dopamine. And the recovery process is especially important. There's a second reward system. So you've got the dopamine system. And I guess to really put a box around it, the subjective reward needs to be done at the hardest portion of a process. The tough conversation with a significant other. It's like when it's really tough and you want— you just— that's when you want to start telling yourself, this is the, this is the good part because I'm not speaking, or this is the good part because I'm not reacting, right? I'm not reacting, or This is the good part because I'm probably not doing it correctly, but I'm on the right path, right? They're upset. They're not feeling your empathy, you know, this kind of thing, or you're not really understanding what's going on. You're getting frustrated. But if you tell yourself, this is the neural pathway getting ground in there, like really dialed in so that then the next time this, I'm going to breeze right past this. That's really how the process works. 'Cause remember, no one comes along and drips dopamine in your ear, even if you get a billion dollars, or you win a Nobel Prize, or you win the presidency. It's all internal. These neurochemicals are all internal, and while some of them are designed to be released in response to things very reflexively, like food, sex, sleep, all these things will trigger these neurochemicals, we have this big forebrain which allows us to place subjective context on things.

Also, to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video, I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight all the lessons learned in this video, as well as pull out our 3 favorite learnings and quotes that will inspire you to actually do something. The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video absolutely for free. There's a link in the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business. I'll see you there. Rule number 5, interact with other people.

And whether or not that competition is with, you know, um, mental material like books and studying, or whether or not it's physical competition, we need external influences. Like, I think we these days, we're so attracted to the idea that we can control everything from the inside, but you need human interaction. It's absolutely necessary. And I think that it sort of harkens back to the story at the beginning. It's like all the stress that I was going through in those years, I mean, it absolutely made me better, right? Absolutely made me. I wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't wish hardship on people, but humans are remarkable in their ability to step into challenge and to meet challenge. I think that there's this important and very, very serious conversation now about mental health, right? The number of people suffering is just tremendous. But I think that we also are forgetting that, you know, that suffering process is— it's a jumping-off point, right? And I've had a number of friends commit suicide. I understand just how, you know, that's, that's a horrible tragedy, and depression is absolutely terrible. But there's also this question of, you know, sort of like, what is our expectation about our Right? Like, we're so— what are we really trying to achieve with our moods? And so I always say there are 5 things that embody our whole existence. It's like our sensations, what we feel, our emotions, our perceptions, our thoughts, and our actions. That's pretty much it. And of all of those, the emotions are the most mysterious. It's kind of a combination of perception and thoughts. You can control your behavior. You can control your thoughts. People often forget this, but your thoughts are your choice. Right? I'm not saying you can suppress thoughts. I think there's been a lot of attention on trying to learn how to suppress thinking. I've never been able to suppress thinking ever, but what I can do is introduce new thoughts. Actually, Steven Pressfield, who wrote The War of Art, brilliant author and ex-military guy, he really— I think he said something like, you know, he was like in his mid-40s before he had his first real thought. And what I like to think he was referring to was the first time that he realized that you could actually introduce a thought that thoughts aren't just all spontaneous, so they can be deliberate. Your sensations you can control by your environment, and your perceptions are largely about kind of like what sense you— your thoughts about what you sense, right? But your feelings, I think we overvalue feelings. And here I'm going to come across as kind of a hardened male about this. I would place myself actually kind of on the wide emotionality scale. But I've learned over the years that emotions are just kind of a mishmash of perception and thought. I think we overvalue their utility, and this is just my opinion. I don't have any scientific data to support it, but I also don't even know how you study emotions in the lab. Every time I see a laboratory that claims they study emotions, they're studying behavior. Every time there's, you know, people are talking about fear and about courage, they're talking about a behavior that's measured. We don't know what these animals feel. I'm the foggiest. I don't know what you feel right now. I barely understand what I feel right now. So I think that as a species, we've been— and in terms of mental, mental health, we've been overfocused on feelings. And I think we need to think more carefully about physiology.

Rule number 6: Break addiction to negativity.

Everyone knows that the brain is very plastic early in life. So from birth until about age 25, you can learn so much, for better or for worse. I always say the downside is that early in life, you have less control over your life circumstances, but your brain is very plastic. So there's a dark and light to that. Later in life, you have a lot more control generally over your life circumstances, but the brain becomes less plastic. However, we know based on Nobel Prize-winning work and recent work in addition to that, that the neuromodulator acetylcholine is secreted when we pay attention to something very specific. It acts as sort of a spotlight in the brain, making certain synapses, the connections between neurons, more active and more likely to be active again than others. So, when you hear that song that you love so much and it moves you and you feel dopamine being pulsed into your body, that's a real thing. You're actually getting dopamine secretion. You've formed that deep association with that. And, acetylcholine draws your attention to that. And, that song is essentially wired in a very indelible way into your nervous system at multiple— you can probably even with certain songs, you can feel your body start to energize because of And of course the brain through connections with your muscles controls your body. So for things that are traumatic or negative, what we're really talking about is neuroplasticity that's focused on unlearning. And most of the therapies for this, whether or not it's EMDR, eye movement desensitization reprocessing, or it's traditional psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, or it's somatic embodied release, big kundalini breathing type, almost all of those are designed to do something, which is to bring the person, or you bring yourself, into a state of heightened alertness, right? You can't do this stuff when you're sort of half asleep. Heightened alertness, and then focusing your attention on the traumatic or negative event. This is the way that it works. And then pairing that with something new. You know, traditionally this was done with things like NLP or in talk therapy where people would feel the positive relationship with the therapist. That was kind of the main rationale. In association with this very traumatic, sometimes even shameful type events. And the idea is that you would simultaneously have those two experiences, the negative one and the feeling of safety, and you would rewire those circuitries. I actually believe that can work, but it can take a lot of times. It can take a lot of visits to the therapist, which is not to say it's bad. It's just not everyone has access to those resources. Things like eye movement desensitization reprocessing, simply moving the eyes laterally while recounting these negative events. The woman who devised this figured out that somehow when people recount these traumatic experiences, when they're doing these lateralized eye movements, not vertical eye movements, they somehow separate out the negative emotions. And I thought for years, people would ask me about this stuff, Tom, and I thought, this is ridiculous. First of all, I'm a vision scientist and I work on stress. It's like, there's no way. And then I really ate my words. Because 4 papers, 2 in humans, 2 in mice, and then a 5th paper published in Nature, which is kind of our Super Bowl of scientific publishing, showed that these lateralized eye movements quiet the amygdala. They actually suppress activation of this threat detection center in the amygdala.

Why would that be true?

Ah, so this is really where it gets cool. Turns out because of when the way that we view the visual world when we move through space, when our head moves or when we walk and things flow past us, that these lateralized eye movements are what happens when you move forward in space, when you're walking, when you're moving forward towards something, and that suppresses activation of the amygdala. Now, you say, "Why?" Well, okay, so then 2018, my laboratory did an experiment. There was actually a graduate student in my laboratory where we're looking at fear. In this case, we were looking at fear to big looming objects that either trigger freezing or running and hiding. There's a brain area that's in your brain and my brain that mice also have that triggers a third option, not run and hide, not freeze, but forward confrontation. This is the, "No, I'm gonna fight. I'm gonna move forward in the face of adversity." This is the growth mindset. I'm gonna lean into friction. And it turns out that this circuit is linked to the dopamine reward pathway. When we move forward in the face of a threat, and obviously we want to do this in healthy, adaptive ways, we suppress activity of the amygdala through physical action of moving forward, and there's a signal sent to the areas of the brain that control dopamine reward. Those reward centers then trigger the release of dopamine to reward forward effort in the face of stress or threat. So when you hear about people saying, "Look, take some physical action when you're feeling exhausted," take some forward physical action when you're feeling overwhelmed by this traumatic experience. Now, that could be in the form of a walk. Now, this therapist, she figured out with EMDR, because you can't take people walking around for therapy sessions, she figured out that these lateralized eye movements are what triggers suppression of the amygdala, and it makes perfect sense because the amygdala, this threat detection center in our brain, it doesn't connect to the limbs. So how does it know if you're moving forward? Well, because the eyes are moving. You have these reflexive eye movements that move anytime you're moving through space. So to make this a little more succinct, it's really forward movement, action, pushing yourself across that threshold, not only rewards you, but it suppresses activity of the fear centers in the brain. And these are ancient hardwired mechanisms. These aren't hacks. These are things that Mother Nature installed in us.

Rule number 7, avoid layering dopamine.

I suggest people avoid layering dopamine. You have one dopamine system that fortunately can be activated by a lot of different things. So for instance, I love the feeling of being completely rested, going into the gym or going for a run mid-morning after a cup of coffee, hydrating well, using the bathroom, listening to my favorite music on a sunny day. But that's a lot of things layering in for dopamine. And what happens is that if that becomes your hope and expectation, fine. But if that becomes your requirement for actually having a great run or workout, you're in trouble because the next time it's not going to be that exciting and you're not going to be that motivated. You actually won't perform as well. So this year what I've been doing is every third or fourth workout or so, I think randomly, I leave my phone in the car. I don't use any music and I don't allow myself any kind of pre-workout stimulant. So I have to generate all the force and energy and everything I'm going to do from internal processes. And you might say, "Well, that's kind of masochistic. Why would you do that? It's supposed to be fun." Well, I'll tell you, the next time when you bring your headphones and you're listening to music, you feel like a god in there. Why? Because you are secreting so much more dopamine, so much more noradrenaline, so much more effective at performance. But then the next time you have to throttle it back. And so I'm excited by all the tools that are out there. There's all this cognitive enhancement stuff and people are plugging into every device and they're trying to figure out, do I have white noise in the background or metronomes? All that stuff, but it's good to not layer in too many things. Um, there are other examples of this where, um, are a little more, um, unfortunate. Uh, pornography is a really good example. There's a huge issue now, right, because pornography is so much more readily available on the internet. Now let's just remove the kind of, um, the moral judgments about it, right, because that's not what this is about. A scientific discussion about this would say that there's an enormous availability and range of imagery that's very powerful that feeds directly into the dopamine system. And a lot of people, young people who are growing up watching a lot of intense pornography, are suffering from a lot of sexual side effects and struggles with sexual interactions in real life because those interactions are not as intense as the things that they're seeing. The other thing that's happening, should just mention, is that I have colleagues that work on this in psychiatry, that they are wiring their nervous systems to become aroused viewing other people having sex as opposed to them having it. And so they're running into a lot of trouble there. So what's happening is dopamine levels are so high that real life— it's like eating extremely palatable foods that are just blitzing your system, every taste bud, high salt, high sugar, high fat, to the point where It's just— and let's assume delicious. I don't generally like those kinds of foods, but— and then all of a sudden it's like, here's a bowl of rice or a salad. It's going to taste like garbage to you because you're— at first anyway. That's got to— that's also got to be sort of trickling over to just social media in general and the dopamine release in response to that versus, say, for example, a real-life conversation. Right. Well, and if you're on social media and you're scrolling and you don't even know why you're scrolling, You don't even know what you're looking for. Your dopamine system has been tapped out and you need to take a break from it. Maybe a couple hours, maybe a couple of days. I think social media is great. I teach science on social media. I see you all the time on social media. There's a lot of great social interaction. There's a lot of opportunity to learn and see things. Some are funny, some are interesting, some are disturbing. But when you're at the point where you're engaging in something and you don't even know what the win is, but you find yourself reflexively engaging in it, your dopamine system is now plummeting, and that's a serious issue. So the other thing is that a picture is worth a thousand words and a movie is worth a thousand pictures. Our visual system is so tuned to watch motion and to see movies. So you're seeing movie after movie after movie after movie. What's happening is the context is switching constantly. The human brain has never been confronted with context switching at this rate. A television went from 6 channels to 12 to 200, but this is the first time that you can walk around with your television. You can have it in your car, you can have it on the phone— excuse me, on the plane. So I use social media and the internet a lot. Unlike email or reading an article online, social media is, you can scroll through 1,000 different or 100 different contexts within 5 minutes. And that's a big override for the brain. And then the rest of the world seems kind of boring. Like, you know, you see people at dinner scrolling their phone. It's because actually the brain wants novelty. It's seeking novelty all the time. These days I'm turning off my phone in the evenings. I'm sort of, I'm on there a little bit, but I'm finding I'm kind of sick of the phone. I think a lot of people are kind of hitting this point where they're like, ah, I'll get on social media for an hour or two a day, but this is getting a little pointless.

Rule number 8: Keep moving forward.

I think that an ability to know that things pass, an ability to know that what you're feeling in the moment is not a permanent state and doesn't necessarily return, an ability to know that your identity 10 years ago hopefully isn't your identity now, and you can actually transform your identity over time, is immensely powerful. It's when we get into these locked regimes of who we are, how we feel, how we think, that kind of the, like, impending doom really takes over. Not to be dramatic about it, but everyone I know that is that isn't able to adopt a kind of different ideas about how things could be different on the outside and on the inside is suffering, right? And everyone I know that has the kind of mindset— unfortunately, I happen to know a lot of people like this— that understand that, yeah, your internal state is something you can shift with exercise, with movement, with ice bath, with breathing, with whatever your, your particular leanings are, then they seem to understand that That like grabbing hold of that internal real estate first is kind of a door that opens like, oh, my world and my life is actually something I completely control. And so this conversation, this portion of the conversation might not seem that scientific, but it's absolutely scientific in the sense that the brain is a time-space statistical guessing machine. It just wants to know what's coming next. That's all it wants to know. And so if you can start to expand the notion of what's come, what could come next, you really start to open up possibility. And in possibility, you start to open up the physiology of the body to explore. And in exploration, you get different outcomes. So these, I think, that this kind of mystical or abstract level of the conversation is really at the core of what human beings are best at, which is using the front of our brain to conceive new ways of doing things. This is like the reason we're not— this is the reason we run the planet and other animals don't. It's like my dog Costello doesn't wake up and say, "Oh, you know, I want more food, so here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to tomorrow—" He just basically is like he does what he needs to to get what he needs in the moment. We're the planners, and in planning, we can do so much more, but in planning, it's also where we suffer if we plan to feel the same way. So, in a lot of ways, we're planning to feel the same way.

Rule number 9, celebrate small wins.

When you start thinking about things like growth mindset in terms of how they convert to neurochemical signatures, it leads us to this place of, okay, if it's subjective, then if I just say, "Look, I'm going to stand up out of my chair and that's going to feel amazing," is that going to work? Well, no. It depends on the meaning that I attach to something. This subjective part can be a little tricky and a little bit hard for people, so I want to try and lay it out in a concrete way so that if they want to apply this, they can. Incidentally, or not so incidentally, I should say, when you look at communities of very high performers, and I'm fortunate enough to do I do some consulting with some people from special forces communities and so forth. They're very good, as are you, at attaching a reward to specific behaviors in subjective ways. So growth mindset and these dopamine rewards that we subjectively apply are not about saying, "Oh, you know, I had a terrible day. I performed poorly, but you know what? It's great. I just feel great anyway." It's not about that. It's not about attaching your sense of reward reward to the ultimate goal. It's about attaching your sense of reward to the fact that you're making action steps that are generally in the right direction. The more you can reward the effort process, the better off you are at building these kinds of neural circuits and these kind of tendencies to be able to lean into anything challenging over essentially any duration. So how does this work? Like how would somebody do this, right? Well, keeping in mind that adrenaline and epinephrine are all great for getting us into action. This is Mother Nature's way of chemically making us feel kind of agitated. Remember, stress was designed to agitate us, to move us away from things and toward things. But realizing that that's a limited resource, that eventually that same chemical is what makes you have a negative mindset, it feels painful, it's the burn in your body, it's uncomfortable, and realizing that dopamine can push back on that neurochemically, it can suppress those sensations of wanting to quit. You say, "Well, then how do I get this dopamine to work for me before I hit a goal?" Because not every day is going to be a real win. There are some days— I mean, I know from my science career, there were days that were really hard, experiments didn't work, papers got rejected, and yet I've spent 2 decades or more just drilling on and drilling on, and it's been a sheer pleasure at times, but there's been some pain points along the way. So what is this process really about, and how would somebody implement these dopamine and epinephrine type neurochemical events in their own life? Well, we all know the example of like wanting to run a marathon. I've never run a marathon, but that'd be a nice goal to have. Let's say tomorrow morning I set my shoes near the door. Now a lot of people have talked about this. Day 1, you set your shoes near the door. Day 2, you go out the door. Day 3, you run around the block. Day 4— but the key thing is not just to go through the actions, but when you hit each one of those self-designated milestones, the milestones that you're setting out for yourself, you have to pause for a moment and tell yourself, "I'm heading in the right direction. I haven't run the marathon yet, but this is the foundation upon which I'm going to lay another foundation upon which I'm going to lay another foundation." And those little pulses of dopamine allow you to get that action step without the depletion that it would normally bring. Otherwise, you're just like you're spending money. This is like replenishing this bank account that you have, and it's a neural bank account. And so dopamine is the thing that you can control the dosing of. And so if you say, "Today it's my shoes at the door, but tomorrow it's around the block and that's it, but that's in the direction I want to go," what you do is you now get those two events plus the next day, the mile-long run and so forth without it depleting you. It actually builds this capacity to build more rewards. Reward. And this is what you've done. This is what people from elite special forces can do. They know how to make small, simple, physical steps in the real world that allow them to build on these reward circuitries, but they don't get delusional about how they're doing. They know, they keep the end in mind, but they get very micro. They move the horizon in very close. And so if you can move the horizon to something you know you can complete, and you reward that, you essentially are where you were before. You're just as strong, if not stronger, but you're heading in the direction you need to go. You're not depleting. You're not spending out anything. And it feels a little weird because none of us like to reward things that aren't external, but the ability to control these internal reward schedules is everything.

And rule number 10, the last one before some very special bonus clips, is learn to focus and engage.

Learning is a two-stage process. And the learning I'm referring to is specifically deliberate learning. Children are learning passively all the time. They're taking in new information. Their brain is not a complete tabula rasa. It's not a complete blank slate. There's some hardwired functions they show up with, thank goodness, like breathing, like heart rate, controlling heart rate. That helps. I mean, offload as much as you can to the genetic program to hardwire the nervous system so they can learn how to walk. Walking is a good example. A kid learns how to walk and then walks reflexively. But of course, at any stage, you can think about how you're walking. You could do hopscotch and you have to change your cadence of jumping and walking. So that's this flexible transition between voluntary and involuntary movement, but you have to learn how to walk. But what we're talking about now is generally deliberate learning, language learning, skill learning, learning knowledge of any kind. Learning how to navigate the emotional dynamics of a relationship or anything, two phases. One is active engagement and focus. Much of the trigger for neuroplasticity as a process is engaged by dopamine and norepinephrine and a molecule called acetylcholine, which is liberated from multiple sources that we always talked about how acetylcholine controls the contraction of muscles. But in the brain, acetylcholine mainly comes from two sets of neurons, one in the brainstem and another in the basal forebrain. And it serves as a kind of a highlighter marking particular connections or neurons that later stand a chance to become stronger. So let me give an example. I don't speak a second language, but let's say I decided I was going to learn conversational French. I would learn some nouns or some verbs. I would I would focus on this, and the greater degree of focus that I bring, the greater amount of acetylcholine is released at that time and at the particular locations in the brain that are involved in enunciating the words and writing, the comprehension, multiple spots within the brain. That kind of marks those or flags those areas as potentially changing later. But the actual rewiring of the nervous system happens during states of deep sleep or sleep-like states. And so when we say neuroplasticity, the brain's ability to change in response to experience, that's a two-part process. It's a process. It's not an event. We always think about things as events, but in biology, almost everything is a process. So the takeaway from this is in order to learn at any age, the most critical thing is that you bring as much focus and active engagement to the learning, the encoding of the information, bringing in the information, and then that you get into a state of deep rest as quickly as possible. Typically, that would be the night after you learn, after you have this trigger. But there are some beautiful studies published in Cell Reports last year and the year before showing that people who take a 20-minute nap within the 4 hours after these triggering learning, or people that do a non-sleep deep rest type protocol, even just sitting there quietly and not doing anything, they learn much faster. In other words, the brain rewires much faster. That interesting. It's very interesting. And what's happening It's very interesting. We've long known that during sleep, there's a replay of the neurons in the same sequence that they were played during the activity earlier in that day, sometimes even backwards for some reason. It's like the songs play backwards at night. Who knows why? I don't think we should focus too much on that right now. But that replay is the consolidation of the information you learn. This is why you try something physically, try it physically, you can't do it, you can't do it, and then you come back a week later and voilà, you can do it. That you had the opportunity to change the neural circuits so that now you can do it.

Acetylcholine is the neurochemical that we want to think about anytime we're talking about neural plasticity and in particular attention, high attentional states. So everyone knows that the brain is very plastic early in life. So from birth until about age 25, you can learn so much for better or for worse. I always say the downside is that early in life, you have less control over your life circumstances, but your brain is very plastic. So there's a dark and light to that. Later in life, you have a lot more control generally over your life circumstances, but the brain becomes less plastic. However, we know based on Nobel Prize-winning work and recent work in addition to that, that the neuromodulator acetylcholine is secreted when we pay attention to something very specific. It acts as sort of a spotlight in the brain, making certain synapses, the connections between neurons, more active and more likely to be active again than others. So, when you hear that song that you love so much and it moves you and you feel dopamine being pulsed into your body, that's a real thing. You're actually getting dopamine secretion. You've formed that deep association with that. And, acetylcholine draws your attention to that. And, that song is essentially wired in a very indelible way into your nervous system at multiple— you can probably even with certain songs, you can feel your your body start to energize because of course the brain through connections with your muscles controls your body. So for things that are traumatic or negative, what we're really talking about is neuroplasticity that's focused on unlearning. And most of the therapies for this, whether or not it's EMDR, eye movement desensitization reprocessing, or it's traditional psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, or it's somatic embodied release, big kundalini breathing type, almost all of those are designed to do something, which is to bring the person, or you bring yourself, into a state of heightened alertness, right? You can't do this stuff when you're sort of half asleep. Heightened alertness and then focusing your attention on the traumatic or negative event. This is the way that it works. And then pairing that with something new. You know, traditionally this was done with things like NLP or in talk therapy where people would feel the positive relationship with the therapist. That was kind of the main rationale in association with this very traumatic, sometimes even shameful type events. And the idea is that you would simultaneously have those two experiences, the negative one and the feeling of safety, and you would rewire those circuitries. I actually believe that can work, but it can take a lot of times. It can take a lot of visits to the therapist, which is not to say it's bad. It's just not everyone has access to those resources. Things like eye movement desensitization reprocessing, simply moving the eyes laterally while recounting these negative events. The woman who devised this figured out that somehow when people recount these traumatic experiences, when they're doing these lateralized eye movements, not vertical eye movements, they somehow separate out the negative emotions. And I thought for years, people would ask me about this stuff, Tom, and I thought, "This is ridiculous." First of all, I'm a vision scientist. Can I work on stress? It's like there's no way. And then, I really ate my words because 4 papers, 2 in humans, 2 in mice, and then a 5th paper published in Nature, which is kind of our Super Bowl of scientific publishing, showed that these lateralized eye movements quiet the amygdala. They actually suppress activation of this threat detection center in the amygdala. And— Why would that be true? Ah, so this is really where it gets cool. Turns out, because of when the way that we view the visual world when we move through space, when our head moves or when we walk and things flow past us, that these lateralized eye movements are what happens when you move forward in space, when you're walking, when you're moving forward towards something, and that suppresses activation of the amygdala. Now you say, "Why?" Well, okay, so then 2018, my laboratory did an experiment there was actually a graduate student in my laboratory where we're looking at fear. In this case, we were looking at fear to big looming objects that either trigger freezing or running and hiding. There's a brain area that's in your brain and my brain that mice also have that triggers a third option, not run and hide, not freeze, but forward confrontation. This is the, "No, I'm going to fight. I'm going to move forward in the face of adversity." This is the growth mindset. I'm going to lean into friction. And, it It turns out that this circuit is linked to the dopamine reward pathway. When we move forward in the face of a threat, and obviously we want to do this in healthy adaptive ways, we suppress activity of the amygdala through physical action of moving forward, and there's a signal sent to the areas of the brain that control dopamine reward. Those reward centers then trigger the release of dopamine to reward forward effort. In the face of stress or threat. So when you hear about people saying, "Look, take some physical action when you're feeling exhausted. Take some forward physical action when you're feeling overwhelmed by this traumatic experience." Now, that could be in the form of a walk. Now, this therapist, she figured out with EMDR, because you can't take people walking around for therapy sessions, she figured out that these lateralized eye movements are what triggers suppression of the amygdala, and it makes perfect sense because the amygdala, this threat detection center in our brain, it doesn't connect to the limbs. So how does it know if you're moving forward? Well, because the eyes are moving. You have these reflexive eye movements that move anytime you're moving through space. So to make this a little more succinct, it's really forward movement, action, pushing yourself across that threshold, not only rewards you, but it suppresses activity of the fear centers in the brain. And these are ancient, hardwired hardwired mechanisms. These aren't hacks. These are things that Mother Nature installed in us.

There are other things that if it's a physical skill that you're trying to learn, as opposed to just a mental skill, then there's a whole kingdom of things that are fun. For instance, if it's a physical skill, you want to generate as many repetitions as you safely can per unit time. So if you say, I'm going to learn dance, you want—

Use a ball machine if you're playing tennis.

Exactly. You literally want to generate repetitions, and in particular, you want to generate failures. Every time you, you give a bad serve playing tennis, oh yeah, that activates the circuits for focus and alertness for the next attempt. Yeah, it's true. That's right. So when you're losing, that's right. So, so that— and a lot of people don't like failures, and so they back away from it. So remember, the nervous system will only change if you give it a reason to do that. And the other one that's kind of an interesting twist on this is The way the nervous system is wired is it wants to pass off all of its work to circuits that are reflexive as much as it can. You don't think about walking anymore because you learned how to walk, but when you were learning, you were very focused on it. One of the things that can set the stage for more plasticity overall is when you disrupt the vestibular or the balance system. It does appear that whenever we are physically off balance, the brain is primed to pay attention, and the chemical milieu is such that it can actually rewire itself faster. And whereas I think the '90s and 2000s brought out a lot of important work on saying, hey, exercise of aerobic type, or maybe even weight training, can create neuroplasticity, it was— that was great, but it wasn't directed enough. It didn't say, well, what kind of exercise? Yeah. And what will get me even more plasticity. And so there are some basal things about heart rate and blood flow, et cetera, but anything that involves balance or coordination, it's incredible how fast the brain can learn. So things like dance, martial arts, a real sport, not just exercising, and I'm not, no disrespect to the, I'm more of a just an exerciser than a sport guy, but if you're 40, 50, 60, 80, whatever, Learning a new physical skill, we know, is tremendously powerful for opening up neuroplasticity broadly. So some people will even leverage this where after they finish some physical skill learning or something, they might take a 20-minute nap, and then they might read, or they might try something. So when we see these people—

I've been learning surfing. I'm like 60 years old.

Perfect. Surfing. And I'm like, yes! Exactly, exactly.

I started learning tennis when I was 45, and it's really a challenge because it's not automatic, and I have to really focus and be present.

Well, these individual cases are not necessarily the place to hang our hat completely, but for instance, the great physicist Richard Feynman, he was well known for learning bongo drums in the '60s— when he was in— well, it was in the '60s, but in his 60s. Then he became a quite accomplished painter later in in life. And, you know, his whole thing was approach all of these things from a standpoint of play with intense focus. Yeah. And I think the play element is key because the play element keeps the agitation in check so that when you're stepping on your partner's feet trying to learn how to dance, or you're failing miserably, it, it can— frustration is a real thing. And so I think that the element of playfulness— some people call it beginner's mind, but I think that should be the anchor point to return to. And people that maintain curiosity, or I should say that cultivate curiosity, and that cultivate a sense of play and willingness to take on new vestibular experiences of all things, they show remarkable plasticity into their late life. And I think that it all comes back to this thing that the brain won't change unless something changes in the weather of the brain. The overall milieu has to say, oh wait, everything that's about to happen is different. Yeah. Otherwise, why would it change? Dopamine is not just about reward. It's one of the biggest misconceptions. Dopamine is about motivation and drive. It's like a jet that propels you along a path. How do we get more dopamine? You practice subjectively releasing dopamine in your mind. Like, how? Okay, so That's a great question. First of all, there are ways you can get more dopamine release through thoughts or through drugs or through supplements. I want to be really clear, there is a drug— there are two drugs actually that will cause massive release of dopamine. They're called cocaine and methamphetamine.

The problem is addicted because it feels so good. The problem is—

exactly, the problem is cocaine and methamphetamine stimulate so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source. It becomes the goal of joy. It becomes the path and the destination. And you look at people's lives when they do a lot of cocaine and methamphetamine, and that baseline on their life goes down. Dopamine is this incredibly powerful molecule that allows us to buffer the effort process. It allows us to be in effort longer, and it allows us to actually eventually enjoy the process of effort and not think about the reward, but just say Oh, I'm enjoying the process, right? Well, you just described the first step. The first step in learning to attach dopamine to the effort process, which is the key operation in order to succeed, is to be very careful about how much you focus on the end goal. Keeping the goal in mind is important for like a proper orientation. You have to know the ultimate destination. But if at any point we were to evaluate our progress relative to that end goal, or if we don't know what the end goal is, there's a huge gap there, and it can feel overwhelming. The key to this is if we want to be very concrete, we should probably focus on actions. And I'll use fitness as an example because it translates to everybody, whereas, you know, people's circumstances differ. Let's say somebody really wants to take on a fitness routine. They hate running, or they want to lose weight in a, in a healthy way, this kind of thing. So we've all heard the example, well, you put your shoes by the door on day Day 2, you put them on. Day 3, you go out the door. Day 4, you walk around the block. And then, you know, and then eventually, like, they're running marathons. Okay, great. But to sustain that behavior, or even to make the behavior pleasurable and to give you energy, the key is to subjectively reward those steps. So it's not going to be— let's say I go out and I run a mile, and my goal is to run 10 miles in a few weeks. The key is, as you're you're in the strain of that mile, the hard part, you want to tell yourself, this is the good part, this is the part that gives me energy. And I'll be very surprised if people don't actually feel like they could continue further. So it's a journey of a thousand miles starts with the single— is made up of, you know, single steps. But the key is to reward the harder steps, not the easier ones, and not the ones where you get the thing that you want. There's a process I'm going through right now where I'm trying to write a book And it's hard, it's hard. And I was told that the harder it is, the better I'm probably doing it. And I was like, great. And my editor's ready to kill me 'cause I'm slow. And I know, and I'm a very slow person. I drive people crazy. I'm like glacially slow 'cause science is slow. And I like to get things right.

You don't wanna rush it. I like to get things right.

But I'm very proud of the fact that everything we've published, I can stand behind. It was the best we could do with the tools at the time. And I just know that when I look back on a writing career or scientific career, I wanna be able to say, Every journal we put it in was rock solid. Everything was rock solid. We had fun doing it, the relationship. So I go slow. But as a consequence, what I'm finding is there are a lot of interferences these days. I think social media is great. I teach neuroscience on social media, 'cause I think it's important to do public education.

But it's a distraction too.

But it's incredible. And it's incredible how much time and energy it can take. So what I've started doing now is I turn off my phone and I lock it in a safe. And I experience extreme anxiety, right? It's so weird.

Why is that? Is it because it gives you so much dopamine that when you're not having it—

well, this is scary because I actually think, um, brief anecdote, on the weekend I was driving, there's a kid that I mentor, and I picked up my phone, I was texting while I was driving, and he said to me— this is really embarrassing for me— he said, you know, I wish you wouldn't text while you drive. And I put it— and I put it down, and I realized, this is crazy. I know that I'd that my life and his life is far more important, and the lives of the people around me are far more important than any text message, which means I wasn't doing it rationally. It's just pure reflex at this point. So I don't think I'd pick up the phone 'cause I don't even know what I'm looking for there anymore. It's just become reflexive. So for me lately, the longer I can keep that phone in a safe and write a grant or this book, What I tell myself is the agitation is good. I'm— it's at least I'm not doing that. And then I find that as I start to write and I get into the process, I start feeling good about it. And I'll pause and say, okay, I have control. I have ultimate control over my behavior. I can put that thing away. There might be a nuclear war out there and I'm just doing this anyway. I have control over my thoughts, my feelings, and behavior. So I tell myself I tell myself that, and then I find I have immense energy, and all I want to do is write. And I kind of tunnel into the process. Wow. And I think that sometimes people need to write these things out for themselves so it's really concrete. I think some people are so unskilled at subjective rewards that writing it out is really powerful.

So what would you write out for yourself as a subjective reward for this experience?

As long as I'm writing, I'm on the right path. As long as I'm not writing and I'm looking at my phone, I'm not on the right path. Because for me, the 2 or 3 things that are most important for my career are writing grants, working on this book manuscript, and writing scientific manuscripts. I mean, there are other things as well.

And anything else that you're not doing is holding you back from doing that.

That's right.

So you need to be focused, center mass forward, on doing those things. That's right.

So I don't do any jumping around, power poses, things like that. I will use tools to kind of ramp up my dopamine. There are certain songs that are really embedded in my— Emotionally based. In my emotional thing that go back to, you know, when I was a, you know, wild, you know, skateboarding punk rock teenager that will get me fired up. And I think there's real utility. That's pure dopamine. There's an interesting process that occurs when people start to realize that rewards are all internal. And what they start to do is they start linking this duration, path, outcome thing to their internal rewards. And so to put this simply, one of the most powerful things that any person can do is to learn to control this idea of duration, path, and outcome, and attach an internal sense of reward, just that you're doing well, to reward yourself mentally, just say, I'm doing well, I'm actually on the right path. To do that inside of the demands that come from the external world, the more often that we can self-reward some aspect of the process, provided it's in the right direction, of what we're trying to achieve, the more energy we're gonna have for that, the more focus we're gonna have for that. And remember, the reason I say energy, I don't throw that around loosely, is that limiting amount of noradrenaline is constantly being kept at bay. You're literally buffering the quit response. And so when people start realizing that if they set the goals inside of the larger goal and self-reward each one of those, they essentially have an infinite amount of energy to pursue those goals. They have an infinite amount of focus to pursue those goals. You see this most in the special operations community and people that are selected essentially for this process. So one of the things that's been intriguing to me, I have some friends from the SEAL teams, and I don't begin to, you know, really understand the real work that they do deployed because I've never done that kind of work, but I've always been intrigued by the selection process, the so-called BUD/S process, right? Because carrying logs and getting in cold water and all that, that's not really how the work is. That's really not what the work is about. So the selection process is interesting because everyone shows up fit, motivated, and convinced that they're not gonna quit.

I mean, I think like there might be a couple of people that just show up to show up, but everybody is absolutely convinced.

And then a very small subset of them make it through. And I'd be willing to bet that the ones that make it through of course they're gritty and resilient, but they all are essentially, right? So that's necessary but not sufficient, obviously, otherwise everyone would make it through. The people that make it through somehow are able to tap into a process. Maybe it's a reward process, maybe it's through self-punishment, maybe it's through self-reward in the positive sense, but they're able to control something inside an environment that is not controlled by them. It's controlled by the environment. Instructors. And I've always been struck by the fact that in order to not, in order to get through, you just have to not quit. Remember, people aren't being deselected. They're not saying, get out of here, you're not good enough. People are deciding that for themselves. And so it's interesting because it brings about a real-world experiment of people who are quitting, and I believe they're quitting because they can't manage these neurotransmitters. And the people, and when I say manage, I think that the people that get through, knowing some of these people quite well, had an internal process by which they could reward themselves for doing something that might've just looked trivial to everybody else, but it gave them more gas, more energy, right? And what's interesting is the process, the kind of unconscious genius of the BUD/S process is that they've picked two sensory events that are, across the board challenging for everybody. One is cold water, which is great because most of the time it can't kill you, right? It's not like heat, which can kill you. It's cold water and sleep deprivation. And so the ability to do these, like what I'm calling DPOs, this duration, path, and outcome steps and procedures, is great on when you're rested, you know? You know, when you have well-fed, well-slept, You can do anything. You can be in any hard conversation. You can work through anything. So what they do is they start taking the autonomic nervous system, which is these deep reserves of the nervous system, that when our autonomic nervous system is off, it starts making us pay more attention to how we feel than the demands of the world around us. Remember that? Yeah. Basic challenge in the nervous system. And so sleep deprivation is the best way that you can pull somebody down from their ability to analyze duration, path, and outcome, and reward themselves. Sleep deprivation is the way in which you essentially pull apart the nervous system and the way that it wants to function, because it's very easy, again, rested, to do all this. But so what they do is they're sleep-deprived people, they put them in cold water, they're trying to get them more in touch with the way that they feel inside than what they need to do in response to the external demands. Everyone I know that's that's made it through that process did it slightly differently, but I'll tell you how they didn't do it. They didn't do it through sheer grit and determination. They did it through attaching a sense of meaning. They did it by micro-slicing the day or slicing the day into a series of meals that they just needed to get to, and then rewarding themselves for getting to that next milestone. So they don't know, I mean, most of them, you know, probably had very low concept of dopamine and norepinephrine, but that's the process. That's also the process I think that allows I also wanna finish an ultra. I've never run an ultra, but I think that process of self-reward is grit and resilience in a kind of neurochemical definition. And I think it's a thing that anybody can tap into. And I think it's, therefore, I think it's so key because I think people think that, it's just so key that people understand, excuse me, that these circuits are not unique to people who run ultras or people that make it through you know, stringent filter, special operations command. Yeah, it's the same thing that it is.

Interesting.

An ability to control your levels of stress in real time is extremely powerful. It turns out you can do this using physiology and neuroscience. Your breathing can directly impact your heart rate and your level of stress or calm. Here's how it works. When you inhale, your diaphragm moves down. This creates more space in your thoracic cavity, and your heart actually gets a little bit bigger. As a consequence, the rate of blood flow through that larger heart volume slows down. A signal is sent from a group of neurons on your heart called the sinoatrial node. That signal goes up to the brain, and your brain sends a signal to speed the heart up. In other words, inhaling speeds your heart rate up. The opposite is true as well. When you exhale, your diaphragm moves up. Your heart gets a little bit smaller because there's a little bit less space in your thoracic cavity. As a consequence, blood flows more quickly through that smaller volume. The sinoatrial node registers that and sends a signal to your brain, and the brain sends a signal to slow the heart down. So in other words, inhaling speeds your heart rate up, and exhaling slows your heart rate down. So if you want to speed up your heart rate and be more alert, inhale more, or make those inhales more vigorous, more intense. If you want to calm down, you can do that quickly by making your exhales slightly longer than your inhales or making them more vigorous. This doesn't require any breathwork. This is something that you can do in real time, and that's what's called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Up. That's the technical phrase. It's also the basis of what's called heart rate variability, or HRV. But all you need to remember is inhaling deeper and longer will speed your heart rate up. Exhaling longer and more intensely will slow your heart rate down and will allow you to calm down in real time. If you want to learn and change your brain as an adult, there has to be a high level of focus and engagement. There's absolutely no way around this because— so focus and intensity and that kind of the Goggins phenotype, right? I think Goggins is now a noun, a verb, and a pronoun, right? It's like, it's amazing. So if you're gonna Goggins this process, what you need to do is you need to, regardless of how agitated you feel, you have to lean in and focus extremely hard. Now, the reason for that is that there's a neurochemical norepinephrine, also called adrenaline, same thing, that's released in the brain and body. Most people back off at that point because they feel this agitation. But we have to remember that that noradrenaline was designed to get us into movement. That's the purpose of noradrenaline, to take us out of stillness and into movement. And then the other thing we have to do is we have to take that elevated level of alertness and we have to focus it. And there's a second neuromodulator called acetylcholine, which is secreted from this little structure in the base of the forebrain when we visually focus on something, or in the case of maybe if you're doing auditory focus, auditory learning when you focus with your auditory attention. Neuroplasticity is triggered when urgency and focus combine. Acetylcholine is released, for the aficionados out there, it's called the nucleus basalis, but that doesn't matter. There's a little compartment of neurons in the base of your forebrain that doesn't like to release acetylcholine on a regular basis. It's greedy. It's greedy, and it doesn't want to use that. If you're a child, it'll rain your brain with acetylcholine, but as an adult, 30, 40, up to— Because Mother Nature designed us to learn what we need to learn and then do that, reproduce and die. I mean, not to be dark about it, but I would say evolution is not about us, it's about the offspring, right? 100%. And then it's not even about them, it's about their offspring. Exactly. Never ends. We are being manipulated from the inside. I mean, that's what kind of drew me in neurobiology is that all these complex things you see in the world It's all internal. So, you know, if you get urgency, it can come from, let's use David as a, he's a shining example of this, right? You can sit there and just ramp up your level of urgency through purely psychological means. You could take an ice bath, you could do high-intensity breathing, anything that brings your level of alertness up. Understanding that pain and pleasure are in this really dynamic balance, can also help us in the following way. Any pain that you feel, the longer day, the less sleep, the kind of agony that things aren't working, that power outlet doesn't work, or the internet is slow, whatever it is, the amount of pleasure that you will eventually experience is directly related to how much pain you experience. So we know this from actually what nowadays would be considered quite barbaric and unethical experiments where they would give people electrical shocks and they would measure their response, and then they'd say, we're going to increase it, we're going to increase it. Eventually they get to the point where a slight shock that was previously very painful actually evokes a sense of pleasure. Now, you couldn't do these experiments anymore. These are not the experiments I do in my lab, and these are older experiments. But for instance, and this has been discussed in scientific research papers, giving somebody a, like, a 10-minute ice bath, for instance, or even a 3-minute ice bath, or a 1-minute ice bath. It's quite painful, but there was a study from the University of Prague. A European Journal of Physiology showed that after a painful ice bath stimulus, the amount of dopamine release goes up for 2.5 hours to 250% above baseline. And that's not because the ice bath itself evokes dopamine release. A lot of people think, oh, cold water evokes dopamine release. No, pain evokes dopamine release after the pain is over. Yesterday I tweaked my back because I do this stupid thing every few years, the same stupid thing, and it's really painful. And then you just remember all the ways in which you can't move around. I was like standing up this morning, I'm like, ah, and just walking is so painful. As the pain has started to dissipate, you get a little bit of a high, right? You get a little bit of a euphoria. That's dopamine because of the, the degree of pain you experience experience previously predicts how much pleasure. So when you start a company down in the dregs and you're shoveling again, that's beautiful because that means that the win that you achieve is going to be as good or greater than the one you had previously, in your case with Quest. And so we go back to this example of the person that's not motivated, that can't get off the couch, that doesn't want to do anything. Well, this is the problem. We remember the rat experiment. They're effectively the rat with no dopamine, but they can still achieve some sense of pleasure by consuming excess calories, by consuming social media. And look, I'm not judging. I do this stuff too, right? Scrolling social media. If you've ever scrolled social media and you're like, I don't even know why I'm doing this. It doesn't really feel that good. And I can remember a time where you'd see something that was just so cool, or you'd see something online. I remember this when TED Talks came out. TED Talks first came out. I was like, this is amazing. These are some, at least some of them are really smart people sharing really cool insights. And then now that there are like a gazillion TED Talks, I remember spending a winter in my office when I was a junior professor cleaning my office finally and binging TED Talks in the background thinking this is a good use of my time. Pretty soon they all sucked to me. I was like, this isn't good. So what you need to do is stop watching TED Talks for a while, wait, and then they become interesting again. And that's this pain-pleasure balance. And so for people that aren't feeling motivated, the problem is they're not motivated, but they're getting just enough or excess sustenance. So they're getting the little mild hits of opio— it becomes an opioid system. And if you think about the opioid drugs as opposed to dopaminergic drugs, dopaminergic drugs make people rabid for everything. You know, drugs of abuse like cocaine and amphetamine make people incredibly outward-directed, right? They hardly notice anything except what they want more of. More, more, more, more, more. It's very— it's bad because those drugs trigger so much dopamine release that they become the reward. It's very circular. The only— the drug can give that much dopamine. Nothing they could pursue would give them as much dopamine as the drug itself. So there's that, and then there's the kind of opioid-like effects of constantly indulging oneself with social media or with video games or with food or with anything to the point where it no longer evokes the motivation and craving. And this is really the new evolution of the understanding of dopamine in neuroscience, which is that dopamine itself is not the reward. It's the buildup to the reward. And the reward has more of a kind of opioid bliss-like property, which itself is not bad if it's endogenous, released from within. But when we can just sit there like the rat with no dopamine, gorging ourselves with pleasures, so to speak, what you end up with is somebody that feels really unmotivated and those pleasures no longer work to tickle those feel-good circuits. And so, there's no reason for them to go out and pursue anything. And that's a pretty dark picture. So, the keys are to pursue rewards but understand that the pursuit is actually the reward if you want to have repeated wins, okay? The celebration has to be less than the pursuit. And that's hard for some people to do. It's got to be that your celebration is slightly less dopaminergic. It can be very reflective. You can be in gratitude. Those are other neurotransmitter systems, but you don't want to be on that high as you celebrate the win. You want to be trickling out your dopamine regularly until you pursue things. To what extent does our subjective narrative, the story, the story we tell ourselves, actually mean something for the body? And to what extent does the body actually mean something for the subjective narrative? So this gets into some areas of work that we're doing now, and so I do want to highlight that it's ongoing work. But I think, you know, the old narrative, meaning a few, 10 years ago, was that if you're feeling depressed just smile. Well, if that worked, right, we would have a lot less depression than we see out there. The reason I call it a brain-body contract early on is that they're— the brain and the body are constantly in dialogue. So, you know, the idea that when we're depressed we tend to be in more defensive-type postures, when we're feeling good we tend to be in more like relaxed and extended postures, all true. But it does not mean that just by occupying the extended posture that I'm going to completely shift the mind, right? That's a first step. Think about like two interlocking gears. It's one gear that turns the other, but then they need to kind of dance together before you can get the whole system going. So how do you get it to dance together? Exactly. So subjective— there is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful over states of mind and body. To answer your question, can you think your way out of the ice bath being cold? So a couple couple things that are important. First of all, just to go a little deeper on what thoughts are, thoughts happen spontaneously all the time. They're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection. But thoughts can also be deliberately introduced. For instance, right now I can say, okay, have a thought that, um, just decide to write your name, and you're— you can do that. I'm going to decide to write my name, and you can do it. So that's a deliberate thought. Which says that you can introduce thoughts. So I think it's very hard to control negative thoughts directly by trying to suppress them. They tend— generally, they tend to just want to continue to geyser up all the time. But we can introduce a positive thought. When people think of hypnosis, I think they think of stage hypnosis.

What's the real deal? Why is it useful?

And, and how do people actually use it?

Yeah, so, um, I'm really glad you asked about this. So I have a colleague, his name is David Spiegel, in Department of Psychiatry at Stanford, and he and I have a collaboration going now looking at how respiration or breathing can be used to shift the brain into different states. And I've talked to David about this, and so I'm sort of borrowing from his words here, so I want to be fair that these are from those conversations. So hypnosis inevitably involves relaxing the nervous system, taking the nervous system into states that are more like sleep. Now what I mean by that is in high alert states, where you're talking and planning and in action, and stress in particular, the brain is very linear. It's saying, "Okay, if this, then this. If then that and that." This is why we tend to be forward-thinking when we're stressed. We tend to be not in our immediate experience, but really kind of forward-thinking. So clinical hypnosis involves going into a state of deeper relaxation so that our analysis of space and time, meaning the way that the brain is perceiving events, is slightly dismantled so that it's a little bit dreamlike, and then the hypnotist— and this could be by listening to a script or listening to a hypnotherapist— starts to narrow our context, take our thoughts, if you will, down a particular path, and that path could be one of stress reduction or smoking cessation. Hypnosis, incidentally, is very good for treatment of smoking cessation. Or for feelings of well-being or confronting traumas. So what it is is it's really opening up the window for neuroplasticity, which is of course the brain's ability to change in response to experience. To trigger neuroplasticity, you have to have focus, especially as an adult. You need acetylcholine released, but high levels of attention, acetylcholine and norepinephrine together, norepinephrine to create that sense of urgency, urgency and acetylcholine to bring that spotlight of focus in really, really tight. That triggers plasticity, but the actual— it marks certain synapses in the brain for change, but the actual changes in the synapses, the rewiring, okay, that happens during states of sleep and deep rest. So, this is why when you're trying to learn a motor skill, you go and you go and your tennis serve is not happening, it's not happening, you take a break, you come back, and you nail it. You're like, "Wait, what happened?" You needed time to set those circuits in motion and allow them to do the rewiring, the sort of adaptation. Hypnosis seems to capture both the high attentional state and the deep relaxation at the same time. It's this very unusual state of mind where you're neither asleep nor awake and in tight focus or narrow focus. And it's very clear that it leads to these rapid changes in behavior because you're rewiring the brain. And the reason you're able to rewire the brain so quickly is because you're getting the trigger event, the focus, and you're also getting the relaxation event simultaneously. And so it's much faster than separating out the learning trigger from the actual rewiring of the brain.

Previously, I told you that it's great to foreshadow failure, that that's a great way to get your system into a state of activation. I also told you that you want to set goals that are challenging but possible. And again, here I'm paraphrasing from the work of Emily Balcetis. I want to be very clear. There are a few other things that one can do in order to bias the likelihood that you will succeed in trying to achieve your goals. First of all, limit your options. Trying to pursue too many goals at once can definitely be counterproductive. Now, I realize that life is complicated. We all have multiple goals that we're trying to pursue. But if we have particular goals that are important to us, we have to be careful to not get distracted by other goals. And many people run into this problem. So setting 1 or 2 or maybe 3 major goals for a given year is going to be more than enough for most people and is actually going to be challenging for most people. Now, of course, we have daily goals and monthly goals and yearly goals. But if we have big lofty goals, we need to be careful not to contaminate our mental space in our visual space with too many goals. And why do I say visual goals? Well, what various department stores and supermarkets have discovered is that the greater the number of things in our visual attention, the more that we can draw our attention and our goals off a line of pursuit. What does that mean? Well, let's think about in the practical context. This has actually been done. Big department stores have figured out that if they stock their shelves chocK-A-Block with many, many options of food or clothing items or objects or anything like that, people simply buy more stuff. People are very prone to orienting their attention to whatever is in front of them. You put a lot of stuff in front of them, their attention drifts. You put fewer things in front of them, their attention is more narrow. In a later episode, we'll talk about designing a workspace that's optimized on the basis of this It doesn't mean being in a room with nothing except just your desk and a computer. It doesn't have to be that sparse, but visual sparseness actually can help us orient our focus and our behavior. When we have a lot of things in our visual environment or a lot of things in our cognitive environment, it's the same thing. And so if you're going to try and pursue a fitness goal, a relationship goal, an academic goal, and a long-term life financial goal all at once, that's 4 things. and you're going to have to come up with systems that allow you to isolate those goals in a very rigid way. I'm a big fan of wellness, and I think it's a great community, but it tends to run in absolutes, and there aren't a lot of operational definitions, as we say in science. And what I love about your question is you're asking for— really getting to the meat of things, asking for the operational definitions. One of the most dangerous ideas in wellness and in popular psychology is that your body hears every thought you have. What a terrible thing to put on people. Wow. What a challenging thing. I don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts. I think there is great value, however, to introducing positive thought schemes. Now, the reason is not because I think it's just because I think so, but because there's actually a neurochemical basis for controlling stress and actually making stress more tolerable and extending one's ability to be in bouts of effort. And that relates to the dopamine pathway. So the molecule dopamine is a reward. It's released in the brain when you win a game, you close a deal, you meet the love of your life, someone likes your photo, the great love of your life, you complete something. But most of our dopamine release is not from achieving goals. It's actually released when we are enrooted root to our goals, where we're in pursuit of our goals, and we think we're on the right path. There was a paper published that essentially was asking why any human or animal quits at any behavior. Now, certain behaviors like I can't lift a car, unless it's a very small car, I can't lift a car. But if it's, we're talking about running, or we're talking about long bouts of work, the question is why do we quit? Like, what is that? And it turns out that every time we exert effort, a certain amount of noradrenaline in the brain is released, and there's a sort of a counter in the brainstem. And at some point, enough noradrenaline is released and it shuts down cognitive control, deliberate control over the motor circuitry, and we quit. That's it. But the thing that can restore those levels or can sort of reset those levels lower and give us more gas, more mileage, is dopamine. And it makes perfect sense because our species had to, move against very challenging things in nature and in terms of in culture at every stage of our evolution, including now, 2020 is a good example of this. And when, a good example would be, if you're really slogging it out and things are miserable, just think like the worst family vacation, everything's a disaster or a very hard physical event and someone cracks a joke, you almost immediately feel a sense of relief. You see this in the team that wins the Super Bowl. Both teams slogged it out. You have to believe they were both at max effort the entire game. Look at the team that wins. They have extra energy. They're jumping all over the place. So it can't be physical energy. It can't be glycogen-related. It's not ketone-related. It's nothing in the body in that sense. It's dopamine's ability to take that level of norepinephrine and smack it back down. And so we can learn this, right? I mean, I think this is where there's real power, like in your story or the story that I'm familiar with, from your book, like the ability to push through those pain points is something that we really can export to other aspects of life because it's the same neurochemicals that are involved. So when you get to a particular location, or maybe you're, I recall, you know, a portion where you're just, you're feeling lousy, you know, you're injured or you feel like you're hurt and you can reframe it mentally and think, I'm actually still on the ladder. I'm still holding onto a rung.

I know at least that much.

I'm still breathing. I know that much. And the lift that we get is not some psychological pump-up, it's a neurochemical thing. It's dopamine suppressing norepinephrine and saying, you're on the right path, you can keep going. It's a permission to keep going. And we grant that permission to ourselves. No one grants that permission to us. I think one of the other kind of misconceptions that we wanna dissolve is this idea that external rewards can actually propel us down long paths of success and high performance. They can't. No, it's an internal reward. It's a sustainable fuel source. Yeah. Yeah. I have a friend from the SEAL Teams and somebody asked us recently, we were giving a talk and somebody said, "How can I make sure that I continue to self-reward and I'm not driven by these external rewards? How can I continue to have that drive?" And his answer was very good. He said, "Give away all the external rewards." awards, you know?

Now, not everyone can afford to do that.

That's just about you and you. It's just you and you. And the more attached— there's a famous Stanford study done at Bing Nursery School, probably not far from where you were in the dormitory. There's a little nursery school in Escondido Village, and they did this study where they looked at kids that liked to— playing during their recess, it's all recess in nursery school, but they're drawing, and they took the kids that really liked to draw, and they started giving them little gold stars on their drawings. And then they liked the gold stars, for a kid, that's an extrinsic reward. And then they stopped doing that and the kids stopped drawing. They just, they associated the good feeling of doing it with the external rewards. We have to be very cautious about how much of our internal dopamine we attach to external rewards if we wanna continue to grow and pursue and focus and work hard. If you just wanna get to someplace and cash in, then fine. But most people find themselves in a pretty miserable place because their dopamine was so attached to external rewards, they need more and more of that.

Well, a lot of people—

#growthmindset is one of the most popular hashtags in social media, but most people don't actually know what it means.

And again, this is Carol Dweck's discovery, not mine. It was discovered in a group of kids that were doing math problems or other kinds of puzzles that they knew they couldn't get right.

but they enjoy doing them and they perform exceedingly well on lots of sorts of tests of that sort when there is the right answer, of course. And so, what they do is they somehow they're wired for effort. They're wired for the puzzle, not for the solution.

And when I say puzzle, I don't mean the noun puzzle. I mean the verb for being puzzled. It, for them, feels good. And so, we need to think— if we're talking about the nervous system and we want to make it actionable for high performance, whether or not it's in business or sport or otherwise, we want You want to think in terms of processes, not events, and verbs, not nouns. Growth mindset as a verb, as an action item, reward as a verb, not just as an, "Oh, you're going to just pat yourself on the back." No, it's what you internalize. It's a process. That's how the neural circuits that underlie reward get stronger. The beauty of the brain is that you have this thing of neuroplasticity, which is its ability to change itself throughout the whole lifespan. The more you practice this, the better you get at it.

And it does not mean you're walking around talking delusionally about how great life is when everything is terrible. It means you might even be very stoic. You might be— hopefully, you're very rational, but you have the energy to continue to push forward.

Because you made it this far in the video, I want to celebrate you. Most people start and don't finish. Most people never actually follow through. Most people say they want something, but they don't ever do the work to actually get it. But you are different. You are special. Believe Nation, you made it here all the way to the end, and I love you. So it's a special celebration. If you put a hashtag #believe down in the comments below on this video, I will showcase you and celebrate you and somewhere on the screen in a future video because you are awesome. For 10 more amazing rules from Joe Dispenza, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

If you think that your thoughts have something to do with your future, just from a theoretical standpoint, that your thoughts create your destiny, and you think 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts in one day, and 90% of those thoughts