PNTV: The Upward Spiral by Alex Korb (#404)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in Less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, the Upward Spiral by Alex Korb. Subtitle Using neuroscience to reverse the course of Depression, One small change at a time. Phenomenal book. Alex Korb is a neuroscientist at ucla. Go Bruins. Dan Siegel, a friend who also is associated with UCLA and their neuroscience and medical departments, wrote the. I think it was the forward. Yeah, the forward to the book. Wasn't sure if it was a testimony or forward. Saying what I believe too. It's just fantastic. It's a great look at the science of depression. Two parts, why we get depressed and what we can do about it. How our brain changes and how we can Change it via 8 Practical Tools. Actually, I'll start there. Philosopher's Note, as always, six pages. We've got 600 of them at Optimize Me. I also have classes on conquering depression 101, conquering anxiety 101, conquering perfectionism 101, procrastination 101, etc. We've got 50 classes, but I know firsthand what it's like to feel really, really bad. And I also know what it's like to conquer those feelings. And I absolutely love this book because it mirrors a lot of the wisdom that we've talked about. So I'll share the eight ideas in a moment. But first, the upward spiral. Here's the upward spiral. That's a little weird. The upward spiral, right? You can do little things that can have a significant difference as you aggregate and compound all those gains. It's kind of like this little line I draw, right? Any one change may not feel like a big deal, but it is. It's aggregating and compounding. And when you put that together over an extended period of time, you get something awesome. On the other hand, you can have a downward spiral. And you may feel like you're in one of those right now. But the point of the book and why I recommend it, if you're struggling with depression or have a loved one who is is, it shows us the neuroscience of how those tiny little changes, you can move forward on a spiral, upwarding spiral toward your potential, rather than that which leads to the ah, oh no, I'm capable of so much more than I'm being and doing. Then you just want to give up. No, no, no. Find the small things that you can do now to move forward. So there are eight Practical tools in the book, we're going to look at a handful of them. But to start, the eight are exercise again. If you're feeling depressed, you know exercise is a powerful mood boost. We're going to remind ourselves of that today. Decision making. You may not know that making decisions is a really powerful way to deal with depression. We'll talk about that in Agency and setting goals in our second idea. Sleep does the body good. Remember the bridge from despair to hope. Despair to hope. Good night of sleep. Sleep is so important. Go check out the PNTV on why we sleep. If you still wonder why, that's good. Habits. We want to do the right thing habitually. We'll talk about that. Biofeedback is an important thing. Your brain is constantly analyzing what you're doing right now. You don't need to external measure of heart rate, measure heart rate variability. Your brain is always responding to simple things like your posture, your breath, and your even smiling, etc. So we're going to talk about that. And then gratitude. Gratitude is a huge way to deal with depression. We're not going to talk about that today, but go check out the PNTV on gratitude works by Robert Emmons. You can't simultaneously be grateful for things in your life and depressed. And if you don't believe me, I challenge you. Go try it. Go be incredibly grateful for all the blessings in your life right now. Just do it for a day and come back and let me know how you feel. I'm not minimizing the challenges of being depressed, but gratitude can't coexist. Depression can't coexist with deep, profound gratitude. The two just don't go together. And again, asterisks. I get it. More nuanced than that, but gratitude is unbelievably powerful social support. We're going to talk about the power of others again. We talked about that in Kelly McGonigal's How We Endure With Others, collective effervescence, etc. And again, when we're depressed, we don't want to do any of these things. But the thing is, we just need to do a little bit. Do a little bit and that will get us going on that upward spiral. And then finally, of course, professional help, et cetera. If you are going to seek professional help, cognitive behavioral therapists, mindfulness based cognitive behavioral therapy, etc. ACT is also awesome. But anyway, so the upward spiral. We've got our note. We've got our first idea exercise, which is the first tip in the book. You want to Go on an upward spiral and reverse depression one small change at a time. Start with exercise. And Alex is funny about it. He says, you know what? I know you've been told a million times that exercise is good for you. Well, I'm going to tell you a million and one times. And I say in the note, I'm going to tell you a million and two times. And he walks through all the reasons why exercise is so beneficial from a physical perspective and helping us sleep better, correcting our appetite issues, et cetera. Right. Of course, the mood boost and then the social side of it, et cetera. But we talk about the fact that John Ratey says in Spark in the Science of Exercise, exercise is like taking a little bit of Ritalin. Focuses your mind a little bit of Prozac. It boosts your mood. Then we've got tall bench. Not exercising is like taking a depressant. Then we have Kelly McGonigal in the joy of Movement. Check out that PNTV we just recently did. She talks about hope molecules and that it's unbelievable. Our bodies were wired to move and were rewarded for approaching life and doing so via our movement and via our exercise. So how's your exercise? See what you can do to get yourself out there. Check out the PNTV on Tiny Habits as well, where we talk about how to install habits. We'll talk more about that here. And then remember the step count. I love this. This little stat from Kelly McGonigal's book. So the number is funny. Researchers have identified a number. I don't know if you count your steps, right? I count my steps. So let's see how many steps. It's 441. As I film this, I've taken 16,186 steps so far today. My average over the last week is 17,669 steps a day. Thank you, Suntow. Watch. I'm grateful for you. I walk, I take breaks. I don't go check in and check on the Internet and stuff and news and tech inputs. When I need to take a break, I oscillate. Boom. Drawing a lot of random stuff. It's good. I'm on when I'm working and I'm off when I'm taking a break and my recovery is going for a walk oftentimes. Right. So walking matters. And that number 5,649 is the threshold. The research says if you don't hit that threshold, you're more vulnerable to anxiety and depression. And the average American gets like 4700 and something steps not wise. We can go out and move our bodies in simple ways, like walking, and get some benefits. Now we want to up that to moderate and vigorous intensity levels. And we know that that has been proven to be as effective as Zoloft in many cases, which is exciting. Exercise 1,000,000 second time complete. Exercise your brain. Then the next thing is to set goals and make decisions. So Sony Lyubomirsky, another one of the leading positive psychologists, says happy people have projects. Ancient wisdom, Aristotle and those old Greek philosophers tell us we are teleological. We need targets to focus our attention on. Right. We need to aim at something that's meaningful, have a meaningful project, set goals. One of the things with depression is we lose hope, maybe become hopeless. Well, the first rule of creating hope is to create a target, a goal, a better future for yourself. And then you need to have agency, a belief that you can actually achieve that target, which is why making decisions is so important. If you're indecisive, that's highly correlated and causally related to depression. Make little decisions, just choose, reduce options. Make a decision, choose, build your agency. And then be willing to do multiple things and try different things to see what works. Set goals, make decisions. Remember, happy people have projects. And then one other thing here we talk a lot about in our work together, we've got this target. That's kind of how I draw a symbol for a target. Yes. I realize it doesn't look much like a target, but you get the idea. Happy people have targets. Bad boom. We focus our energy on something that matters to us, that feels good. Right. But when we dissipate our energy on all these inputs, that doesn't feel great. Now the issue here is what do you want? And if you want to move from victim to creator to hero to the hero of your life, ask yourself the simple question, what do I want? It's a way to flip the switch. Stop complaining, stop criticizing, just get clear on what do I want. Even my kids. I'm going to write a plus one on whining to winning. Right. So what do you want is what I ask my kids. I hear you, but it's tough to hear you through that whine or through the screaming, whatever. What do you want? Tell me what you want. I can help you get what you want when you tell me what you want. Oh, you want that perfect or not, but we can have the conversation about it. So what do you want? We want to know that. Then we need to know. Well, what do you need to do now? Set a goal, Make Decisions take action, little bits at a time. Upward spiral versus the indecision. The lack of clarity goes on the vicious downward cycle. Then, of course, we need to create habits. And Alex says, look, it's trite but true. Repetition, repetition, repetition. We are not what we. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Is someone paraphrasing Aristotle's wisdom on the subject. We talk a lot about using your willpower wisely to install habits that run on autopilot. But you can only get to that point when you engage in the behavior consistently. So you want to reduce the variability of your behavior and say, I'm going to do this at this point. And then you run it algorithmically. We like to talk about. Again, check out the PNTB on tiny habits for more on that. And then one other important thing. Particularly for those of us who have or are suffering from depression, there's a lot of shame often involved in our failure to live up to our own standards. So the challenge is we want to hold our standards. Perhaps we need to adjust them to embrace the constraints of reality, which is a tall Ben Shahar phrase. The perfectionist thinks they can actually be perfect. The optimalist knows they're never going to be perfect and that their ideals are guiding stars, not distant shores. There's a big difference. I know I'm never going to get to a place where I'm perfect. So I can accept myself now and use these ideals as guiding stars as I navigate my ship toward that ideal. Again, I'm never going to get to that distant shore. But when we inevitably fall short of our standards, we. We want to let go of shame and we want to focus on seeing what we can learn from that mistake. So it's win or learn kind of concept. And Lanny Basham with winning in mind, check out the PNTV and notes interview. And all that he says needs work if you miss the target. He was literally a rifle shooter, Olympic gold medalist rifle shooter. He shot at targets for a living, right? If you miss the mark, then you don't shame yourself. You simply say, needs work. And you quickly analyze, what did I do that led to me missing the mark? What could I have done differently? Then you replay that in your mind and you got better. And then the mistake becomes awesome because it helped you grow. And by the way, Ray Dalio, as I've mentioned a number of times, uses the exact same spiraling image for his success principles. Now, Ray Dalio is one of the most successful flourishing human beings on the planet. His whole model is predicated on aggressive goals and failure where you dip down but you learn and you get better and you fail again, you set more goals, then you fail again and you set more goals. And he gets so excited about his failures that he gets what he calls a mistake learners high. And we need to really get that viscerally then life isn't about being perfect, it's about going for it and then learning and adapting. But again, when we get depressed, we tend to get all beat up on ourselves and negatively interpret that. It's just neutral data, have neutral thinking on it. Get clear on, well, what do I want? I want to feel better. I want to get a better night of sleep. So then staying up all night looking at technology isn't a good idea. Or eating this particular food if I want to reach my optimal weight isn't a good idea. Perfect. Great data. Start choosing new behaviors consistently and you can move up next idea. Biofeedback. Now of course, that's biofeedback. Even looking at how many steps I've taken is a form of biofeedback. One step removed. But that's how many steps I took. So we can use external devices. When I train, I have a heart rate monitor for my little suunto watch here. I use a pulse oximeter to measure my blood oxygen saturation. I have an OURA ring that measures my heart rate variability, resting heart rate, approximate sleep patterns, et cetera. Those are all forms of biofeedback. Alex says they're great, but you don't need to go outside of yourself because your brain is constantly performing biofeedback. So how you hold yourself is one of those tiny little things that can dramatically change your life. So if I'm sitting here and I'm all hunched up and I'm wilted over like a wilted flower. Some teachers would say I'm doing depression. Zen therapist David Reynolds says, don't do depression. Stand up, throw your shoulders back, flip the switch. Amy Cuddy style presence. Pull a thread through your head. We coach our optimized community all the time. Channel the best version of yourself. It literally changes your underlying physiology, your testosterone and your strength and power goes up a little bit. Your cortisol gets reduced a bit. Especially when you combine that with nice deep breathing. Most people are hunched over all day, every day, looking at little screens, reducing their power measurably, science says. And they're breathing shallowly in their chest, through their mouth. Biofeedback. The only time we used to evolve, the only time we used to breathe through our mouths was in the most intense, stressful fight or flight situations. Right. Which is a sympathetic nervous system response. These days, most people, or the vast majority of people breathe through their mouth all day, every day. You're literally eliciting a fight or flight emergency response all day, every day. Breathe through your nose. We talk about this in breathing 101. I'll do a PNTV on breath and a few other breathing books. But the rule is very simple. Mouth is for eating, nose is for breathing. Three rules for proper breathing. Breathe in through your nose. Let's do a breath right now. If you feel so inspired, breathe in through your nose. Now I'll do one with you down into your diaphragm. I teach my son. Blow up a little balloon in your belly. Just to exaggerate the idea. Breathe into your belly. Your shoulders shouldn't be going up and down. You should be going in and out here, in through your nose, down into your belly, back out through your nose. Extended exhale. That extended exhale through your nose. Little more pressure to get the last breath out is the way you flip the parasympathetic nervous system. Calm, confident. Again, biofeedback. Your brain's interpreting that. Oh, you're breathing calmly, nice and slow and rhythmically, and you're exhaling longer than your inhale. Everything must be cool. You're not running away from a lion. I can relax, but if you're breathing improperly, you're literally training yourself to feel negatively. So simple little things we can do, like the posture and the breath and even a smile. You can bring people into a lab, as goofy as it sounds, and have them hold a pen. I don't have a pen I can hold between my lips right now. Have them hold it between their teeth. If you have a pen, put it between your teeth. Right. To clamp on a chalk might be a little weird. So I'm going to avoid that Clamp on the pen with your teeth and it kind of simulates a smile. If, on the other hand, you put the pen between your lips, it kind of simulates a frown. That simple biofeedback mechanism influences your overall well being and you'll rate things as funnier when you're smiling with the pen in your mouth than if you're frowning with the pen in your lips. These little things matter. Upward spiral biofeedback posture again. Just flip the switch. Invite the best version of yourself to the party. Clark Kent to Superman style. Right? We share a clip with our coaches of here's Clark Kent being all goofy and whatever, and boom, there's Superman. He's focused, he's chest up, chin down, nice long and tall, breathing deeply with a confident smile on his face. Again, it might sound goofy, but these little things matter, especially when we need to get on an upward spiral. Final idea, the power of others. The power of others. Alex talks about some really powerful studies that I actually quote in a plus one we'll link to. You can check that out. An optimized plus one on the power of others. You can have people come into a lab again, split them up into two groups, have them dunk their hand into a bucket of ice. One of the ways that scientists induce pain. And they try to analyze the threshold for pain tolerance. Now, one group does it alone. The other group does it with a friend or even a stranger in the room. The group that has someone around them can sustain that pain longer. They experience a lower degree. They can sustain it longer than those that are alone. You do the same thing with shocks anticipating a shock. In a brain FMRI study, in this case, it was women who either had their husbands there or not. Those with their husbands holding their hands were able to sustain more of those had less anxiety worry centers triggered in their brain than when they were alone. Even a stranger or the doctor in the room would make their anxiety, their worry centers, calm down. Others are important. We want to find again, when we're depressed, we tend to want to isolate ourselves and not connect. That's when we need to do little things. And again, when you start doing these little different things, you can exercise with others. Join a group. Set a goal to exercise a certain number of minutes a day or a number of days a week or whatever it is. Then make that a habit. And then notice how you're holding yourself throughout the day. All these things work together synergistically in really powerful ways. And then finally, on the power of others. This is a big deal. We talk a lot about ideas, big ideas and wisdom, but the reality is community and is actually the fastest way to optimize your life. So we like to think of it as wisdom plus community. But community is actually the fastest way. So if you feel inspired, come on over to optimize me. We have a social platform that's pretty private and nascent at this point, but connect with people who share your values. If you're into these ideas and these episodes, check us out. And if cash is getting in the way of you joining our community, let us know. We offer scholarships to people around the world where currency conversions might be an issue or significant financial hardships prevent you from being able to pay the 10 bucks a month to join our community, et cetera. Perfect. We don't want money to get in the way. Let us know, we'll help you out. We have a community that you might find inspiring. And again, we hear all the time that there's no one in my world who shares my values. And that's a really toxic thing. We need to have people who are going to support us and uplift us as we spiral up and strive to be the best, healthiest, most flourishing version of ourselves. So again, if that inspires you, check us out at Optimize Me. We'll put a direct link to that as well. Below for now, the Upward Spiral. Alex Korb. Thank you, sir, for a great book. Exercise, Setting Goals, Making Decisions, Habits, Repetition, Biofeedback Again, and the Power of Others. What was the idea that jumped out and landed the most for you? What was it? How can you channel some Musonius Rufus from our last PNTV and move from theory to practice to mastery A little more today? Get on that. Get on the upward spiral. Look forward to seeing you tomorrow. Have an awesome day. See you. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me. Hi, this is Brian. Hope you enjoyed that. If you want to go deeper into Optimize, check us out at Optimize Me. The team has set up a free two week trial where you can get instant access to all 600 plus philosopher's notes, all the PDFs, the MP3s, get it on the app, et cetera, and 50 optimal living 101 classes on a range of subjects and of course the thousand plus optimize ones. And then if you want to go all in, check out Optimize Coach. Optimize Me for the free trial for the core wisdom Optimize Me Coach. If you want to go all in and master yourself, serve heroically and empower others to do the same. Have a great day. See you tomorrow.