How to Heal the Mind With Dan Siegel

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Hey, it's JJ Virgin. And welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show where we'll connect with some of the coolest people in the world. Plus, I give you tips that you can put into fast action to uplevel your health and your life. Now, today's show. Oh my gosh, I am so excited about this person I have on the show today. I can't stand it. Like, you know when you have someone on the show that you've just watched for years and now I'm getting to talk to them. So today we're going to be talking about the mind. And I want you to think for a second and go, what the heck is the mind? Right? You don't really have a quick answer. And that's what we're going to be talking about is what is the mind about? I've got Dr. Dan Siegel here with me, and the title of his book that just came out is A Journey to the Heart of Being Human. It is the stuff he's going to share with you about what he's figured out over the last couple decades on the mind. And then just a simple, kind of a simple technique that can dramatically change your mental health is. I'm just, I'm super excited. So let me tell you a little bit about him, if you don't know him. Dan Siegel, M.D. is a new York Times bestselling author and the founding editor of the Norton Series on interpersonal Neurobiology. He's a clinical professor of psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and the executive director of the mindsight Institute. He has, like, got a load of books. He has three New York Times bestsellers, Brainstorm, the Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain, the Whole Brain Child, and no Drama Discipline. And then he's got a bunch of other books as well. What he's known for is making the complicated scientific concepts accessible and exciting. And he's been speaking all over the place to the king of Thailand, Pope John Paul ii, His Holiness the Dalai Lama at Google, at London's Royal University or Society of Arts. I mean, he's just amazing, amazing man. And I'm so honored to have him on the show today. So, again, Today's guest is Dr. Dan Siegel. All right, so let's do it. Dr. Dan Siegel, welcome to the show. I'm so glad you're here with me today.

Great to be here with you, Dr. J.J. virgin.

Oh, thank you. Now, you've got this new book out called Mind.

Yes.

And, you know, I look at mind, and I go, well, what exactly? Because we don't really have a definition, I guess, of mind. What. What is the book? What's the book about? What's a mind?

Exactly is exactly about that. The fact that we have a word, mind. And when you ask a citizen on the street, they don't have a definite definition. Like, they'll say, it's our feelings and our thoughts and our memories, but we actually don't exactly know what those are. And then when you ask professionals, what's your definition of the mind, like someone in psychology or psychiatry or mental health or education, even the field of philosophy of mind, there isn't a definition. So this book is all about, can we offer a definition of the mind, which I offer in the book, and then see if there's scientific support that that definition actually offers some value, that it may be perhaps accurate. And if it's accurate, what does it tell us about how to develop a strong and healthy mind?

All right, so how do you go about figuring that out then?

Well, what happened with me was back in 1992, after I was done with my residency training, I started pediatrics, which is psychiatry, became a researcher, and then I was the training director in child and adolescent psychiatry. It was the beginning of the decade of the brain. I brought together 40 scientists, and I asked them one question. I said, look, what is the connection between the brain, which we all could define, right? All these neurons up in your head and the mind? And these 40 scientists in the room could not come to any consensus about what the mind that they would discuss would be. What would you define it as, and how would you connect it to the brain? So in the interaction being a week before the next meeting, I felt really nervous that this group would just completely fall apart. And I had invited all these people. These were my former teachers. They were now my colleagues, my peers. So I felt really concerned that it wouldn't work. So I thought, like, what does an anthropologist who studies culture, who is in the room. And a linguist who studies the way, like right now you and I are speaking to each other with language. And a psychologist who studies memory and thought and emotion, and a psychiatrist who studies disorder, and a neuroscientist, you know, who studies the way the brain functions. What would they have in common, for example, with what a physicist in the room might say or a computer scientist? And how would you actually say what this mind was? So I was walking on the beach, and the short version of this story was I thought about if someone asked you, let's say, jj, you and I were walking on the beach, and someone said, hey, J.J. hey, Dan, what is this coastline? And I said, well, it's the sand. And you go, well, it's the water. And the person goes, well, why aren't you two getting together and saying the coast is both sand and sea? And in many ways, I thought as I was walking on the beach that that's what was happening in the university, that everyone had their particular, you know, the old story of the Indian blind men and the. And the elephant, the Indian fable, which basically says you study one part of an elephant at a time, and you're very accurate about your part, but you don't see the whole elephant. So I came back to the group the next week with the following definition, saying that the thing that was shared within culture or in groups for sociology, or in language as we speak to each other, or even in looking at family relationships, and I was trained as an attachment researcher, so that's what I was trained to do, was energy and information flow. Flow is change. Information is a pattern of energy with symbolic value. And energy has lots of different ways. It presents itself as sound like right now we're speaking to each other with the movement of air molecules. That's energy. Or in the brain, it's electrochemical energy flow. So that flow happens inside your body and it happens in your relationship. So I said, what if the system of the mind is energy and information flow that's embodied not just in your head, but throughout your whole body and relational, so it's between you and other people or you and the planet. And what if one way of looking at the mind is that this system is what's called a complex system. That's a mathematical term. And it has what's called. Are called emergent properties. They arise from the elements of the system interacting with each other. There's no programmer like Bill Gates programming Microsoft, you know, emerge. It just happens, which is kind of counterintuitive. And one of the emergent Properties is really counterintuitive. It's called self organization. And what that means is it arises as an emergent property from, in this case, energy and information flow, or if it was a cloud, it would be water molecules and air molecules interacting. But then it turns back and regulates the very stuff from which it's emerging, which is why it's counterintuitive. And I said to the group, okay, here's the definition. See what you guys think about it. Women, men in the room, all these scientists, the emergent self organizing. So that's the math property of a complex system. Where is it? It's embodied. It's not just in your head, which of course is what we've been saying since the time of Hippocrates. It's just from the brain. I'm saying it's fully embodied. But you know something, energy and information flow isn't limited by scholar skin. So I said this flow is also relational, which made an anthropologist feel good about that. And it regulates, that's what self organization does. The flow of energy and information that's both within your whole inner world of your body and your relational world. And with that definition, we went around the room and jj, because I know you've been in academics like I have, you know, there was 40 out of 40 people that voted yes.

So wait, let's back up for one second because these 40 out of 40 people, because you, you kind of skated over this. Okay, I got these 40 people together. Why?

So just to give you the context, and this is why I wrote the Mind book with all these kind of stories of how this, all this stuff unfolded back then, you know, in medicine, psychiatry as a branch of medicine, who was really building on this age old comment that the mind was just brain activity. And the outcome of that view was that all you would do with someone with a mind difficulty, like emotional problems, thinking problems, behavioral problems, is you give them a pill. And this kind of was confusing to me because I didn't think that's all that the mind was. And I was trained as a psychiatrist. So for me, I decided to become a researcher in 1989. And when I was done with my research fellowship, they asked me to be the training director. So this was right when I started being a training director. And it was also the beginning of the decade of the brain. So the intellectual climate was we were looking under the skull and saying, oh, look at these beautiful pictures of brain firing. And they would say things like, here's a picture of the mind, as if brain firing were a Synonym for mind. And that, from an intellectual point of view, confused me as a clinician. It really felt wrong. And so what I decided to do was just take my teachers who were in all these different fields of anthropology, linguistics, you know, bring in other people who are interested in this one question. What is the relationship between the brain?

So you got all these people from all these different areas to come out and do. I mean, that in itself is kind of wild. And then you keep. You keep saying it's the decade of the brain.

Yeah, that's a formal term. I think the president at the time, I can't remember who it was, declared that this would be the decade of the brain. And that's a formal name of the 1990s. And, you know, there was a lot of money put into brain science. And it was fantastic. We were, you know, developing. First it was PET scans, then we developed MRIs and then functional MRIs, and of course we had CAT scans, but you couldn't see function with that. So it was a very exciting time. But for me, you know, looking into the research of this, writing this book, Mind, you know, Hippocrates said the same thing 2,500 years ago. So, you know, my interest in bringing these 40 people together, you know, which included physicists, there were people in the room that were into computer science. There were all sorts of folks.

I'm so impressed you could get them all together.

Well, here's what happened with that. How long we stayed together. Four and a half years. Wow. It was intellectual heaven, you know, because with that definition, an anthropologist could speak respectfully to a neuroscientist, who could speak respectfully to a linguist. We were all on the same page, so to speak, because energy and information flow can be studied in a culture and it can be studied in a cortex.

So bringing all these people together and getting this definition and realizing that the mind is more than just brain activity up in your head, you know, it's more than just brain. What. What was the outcome?

So here's the immediate outcome with that definition. First of all, the group stayed together, which was really cool. But the most immediate outcome for me as a therapist, I'm a psychiatrist who practices psychotherapy, was to ask the next question, which is, if that definition of the mind is true, if it's accurate, if it's valid, then the next reasonable question to ask is, how do you optimize self organization? And then when you look into the math of that, here's what it says. Optimal self organization, first of all, has these five qualities that if you rearrange it, it spells the word faces. So it's flexible, F, adaptive, A, coherent. These are math terms. C, that means holding well together over time. So it's a form of mathematical way of describing resilience. So coherent E is its energized and S is it's stable. So when I saw that, I said, oh my God, that's such a beautiful definition of mental health. You know, now I hadn't ever seen any definition of mental health, so I can't say it's the best, it's just the only one I saw. And it was from math. And then the next thing that the math said, which blew my mind, was when self organization is impaired, you go to either chaos or you go to rigidity or some combination of the two. And I had already noticed that in my patients that I know it didn't fit with what I was taught. But you know, for example, if someone came in with trauma, the chaos would be flooding their inner world with memories of the trauma or feelings of the body, or the rigidity would be shutting down and feeling demoralized and literally feeling numb. Or that's related to experience. You could have something like manic depressive illness not caused by experience, but the chaos of mania and the rigidity of depression. On and on I went through every symptom of every syndrome of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, dsm, the bible of mental health. And every one of those symptoms could be reinterpreted as chaos or rigidity. So then I said, well, how do you create optimal self organization? And the answer is so simple that when I've had interns work with me, I said, please, please, please disprove this because it is so simple, it can't be true. And they would say, what do you mean disprove? I said, yeah, anyone could like get one thing to support what you're saying. Find one thing that disproves this. And here's the simple statement. Optimal self organization is created with the differentiation making special of aspects of a system and then linking them together. And though that's for math and math doesn't have a common name for that, we can use the common word integration to define it very simply as you differentiate and then you link the differentiated parts. And the important thing there is it's not blending, it's not homogenizing. You maintain the differences more like, you know, a fruit salad rather than a smoothie. You're not blending everything up. This is where the phrase comes from. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So here's the beautiful thing. Integration creates the faces flow, flexible, adaptive, coherent, energized, and stable. So back in 92, here was the suggestion I made to the group. Mental health, and maybe even all health comes from integration. And 24 years later, now that I've written this book, mind the data that would support that. You'd never say prove, of course, you want to just always say support and see what happens as we keep on going forward. But here's what we know. We know that every study of any psychiatric disorder in terms of looking at the brain, has so far revealed impaired integration. Autism, schizophrenia, manic depressive, illness. Those individuals have impaired integration of the brain. And that's not from what experience caused. But if you look at severe abuse and neglect, its outcome is impaired integration. So this is consistent with the finding that all of those conditions have chaos or rigidity. And then a study came out in October 2015 by the International Human Connectome Project, and we have an online program. One of our online students called us, and she said, hey, have you guys seen this study? And we hadn't seen it yet. So she sent us the link. And the study basically says this, that across many countries, they took every variable of well being that they could imagine and then studied the brains of the individuals who they surveyed. And one brain factor correlated with well being. And the way they describe it is it's the interconnections of the connectome. What that means is, how are the differentiated areas of the brain linked? In other words, how integrated the brain is, is the best predictor of every variable of well being they could find.

Well, how do they determine that?

Oh, well, there's a new set of studies that you can do with advanced technology. One part of it is called diffusion tensor imaging. Dti. And what you do, unlike a functional mri, where you're just looking at blood flow changes with activity, with dti, what you're doing is you're using magnets. Yes. But you're shaking the liquid so that you can actually get this incredible pictures of the structural connections that are very small that link the differentiated areas of the brain. We could never do that before. So even if you look at, let's say, mindfulness meditation, if you said to me, hey, Dan, you know, how would you summarize all the research of the brain of mindfulness meditation? We're on an elevator ride, right? Floor two to floor five, like, oh, my God, jj, here it is. Mindfulness meditation. All the research of the brain shows makes the brain more integrated.

This is, like, super cool, because What I'm imagining then is, so now you can test to see how integrated a brain is. That is really going to, you know, kind of show where someone is kind of on their scale of mental health. And then there's ways that you can train them, you can correlate it, and then there's ways from like maybe tapping and meditation, neurofeedback, that you could actually train them to increase this integration.

Exactly. Couldn't say it more beautifully or simply. Absolutely. So if someone's had head injury, for.

Example, I'm listening hard here.

Now, as you know, you want to find ways where the injury from either the direct impact or the inflammation that followed the impact has impaired integration and then do integrative mental practices.

When is this going to be common medicine, though? You know, and I will share with you that when my son was in the ICU and they did, you know, they said there really isn't any way to really see this. I think they did in EEG at the time, but. And then I went and had Daniel Amen spec scan him, and we've had him brain mapped, but no one's talked about this. I haven't heard this from anybody.

You know, it is a new way to think. And, you know, it's. I think part of why I wrote the Mind book was just to lay out in a set of questions, really, for the reader to not be just given a download of information, but to experience it really from the inside out. I'm asking all these questions and involving the reader almost like we're in a conversation, you know, or a long, long, long lunch, you know, to say, hey, is this your experience? And look at this and hear the research here. But what's your experience? Here's the experience I had and putting it together like that.

So can the questions. Can the questions, they're not going to take the place of, but can they actually, like, help you determine the level of how integrated your brain is? Can those questions do that?

Yeah. So here's a couple of things just to lay out. One is when we talk about the mind, we're talking absolutely about the brain, but then we're also talking about the whole body. So, like, your work on endocrinology is super important. Our exposure to toxins, super important. The bacteria in our intestines, super important. So we want to talk about the whole body, but then we also want to talk about the relationships in which a person lives, the immediate relationships we have with friends and family, but then the larger setting, our neighborhood, our culture, and how integrated it Is so. Yeah, so here's so. So that's when we're thinking about the mind, we want to think in these larger terms. And then one way to really imagine it is this. Let's say someone, you know is struggling to belong. Like, I just was up in Northern California doing some public speaking where sadly, you know, some. There's been a rash of suicides among the high school students. And, you know, one of the goals of adolescent brain development that I read about in brainstorming is that the brain become more integrated. But if you grow a kid up in a culture where the only thing that has meaning is the elitism of the school you get into, then the fact is it's not an integrated way to live. You know, it's. There's something quite rigid about that. Right.

Well, it's also competitive. And you're. You're actually. It's almost anti. Because what you're saying here is the mind is not just. It's not your brain, it's your whole body, but it's not just your body, it's outside and you communicating with other people. And it's not just the integration of your mind and body, but the integration of you with other people.

Exactly.

And therefore, now if you're in competition to get into the best school, you've just shut down a big part of that integration. Right.

And with that shutdown, life is meaningless and you jump in front of the train. It's so sad. What was empowering about it, because I had a lot of adolescents in the room, as well as their parents and teachers, is I said, let's collectively rethink what we're doing, because we've come down a road of massive increased stress and this massive sense of meaninglessness and hopelessness. But we don't have to continue living like that. And what I tried to do in my talk with them and, you know, it was so powerful to be there with the parents, the teachers, and the adolescents themselves is say, let's cut out the madness, get good sleep, get good exercise, have relationships. The research is really clear. You don't need more than a couple hours of homework. You know, it doesn't do you any good. And by the way, you know, you don't need to go to some big, fancy elite school to have any kind of probability, increased probability of positive things in your life, whether it's achieving success, you know, with attributing, you know, contributing to the world or. Or getting finances or, you know, or being happy or having relationships, you know, so I really tried to Speak to them from the science of it to say, you know, we have the ability to use our minds to, in our relationships and the way our brain functions, you know, to rethink this and create more well being by creating more integration. And that's the exciting thing. So to answer your question, you know, the way you would look for it is, is there chaos in your life or someone you care about's life and is there rigidity? And if so, you know, that's a sign that there's impaired integration either in the relational world or in the brain world or the body world. And then once you figure out where the integration is impaired, because it could just be in the culture that someone's surrounded by, right? And then you need to work at that level. So, you know, in a book called Mindsight, I talk about these nine domains of integration. But it's really kind of fun because it makes it really clear, okay, there's somewhere where integration is paired. All I have to do is look at chaos and rigidity. I don't need to do a brain scan. And then you go, okay, I think it's a brain issue. Fine, and do a brain scan. But sometimes it's a relationship issue.

Oh no. I'm thinking about everybody. I know that with rigidity issues where I've seen this going on. And I just am thinking of my son right now who's got, you know, going through this brain injury and the rigidity stuff that's happened. And a lot of the issues he's had now is through social isolation. And you know, not like if you that just that whole idea of your mind being this flowing organism that also is, you know, impacted by those others around you, that's how you integrate. That makes complete sense. So fascinating stuff. And it also, I love the fact that you can go through and self identify using these books because I would imagine most of the tools that are going to help you integrate would be things like social interaction, not being on social media and, and getting out there and doing things like Tai chi and meditating and just the stuff that we're like, we've gotten so far away from that we need to get back to like gardening. One of the things that's helped my son the most is just going out and getting in the dirt and working in the dirt.

He's connecting with nature and that's a relational integration he's doing.

He's actually gone through and created these things himself. And I've been watching him do these activities. I'm like, that is so interesting things. He was never interested in before that he's using to heal himself.

Integration that can heal. Integration is the base of healing. Integration creates the capacity for optimal regulation. That's the amazing thing. And that happens both in our bodies, including the brain. The brain is great, but it's not the end of the story. It's the whole body, but it's not the body alone. It's also our relationship world. So what your son is doing with nature is not just, you know, like icing on the cake. It is the cake. Our relationships are part of where our mind emerges. And when you put integration into the mix, it's absolutely amazing. The science supports this in so many exciting ways and the practical applications of it are so rewarding because basically you've heard the whole thing. Chaos and rigidity, impaired integration. Find out where integration is impaired and you can do something with your mind to create embodied and relational integration.

There you have it. Genius and super simple when you really get down to it. Super simple when you put it all together. So thank you so much for that. Thank you so much for your work. It's just fantastic.

Oh my goodness.

I've heard your name forever. And I was so excited to get you on this podcast. And for everyone listening, you can go to jjvirgin.com forward/doctor Dan Siegel. Let me spell his last name and it's D, R, Dan. S I, G E L. Dr. Dan Siegel.

S I, N, G L. Yeah.

S I, E G E L. Right. S I, E G E L. And we'll have it in the show notes too. And I know you just went and did a deep dive into the book Mind A Journey to the Heart of Being Human. And you're going to give that video to everyone listening. And I'm super thrilled with that.

That's great. You know, it's an audio tape and just to get you prepared, we talk about the integration of consciousness. And I just completed a 10,000 person study where I report the results in the book, but also I report it in this two hour audio that you'll hear. But it takes you to some really exciting places. And jj, if you get a chance to either listen to that or read the book, let me know what you think.

Because it's not an or, it's a. Both.

I'm doing both.

This is excellent.

Then we'll say to be continued. Because when you see the nature of consciousness, it becomes so profoundly interesting and exciting, even to a deeper level of like, what is time? Who are we? What's our identity? And what are our connections to each other really all about.

Awesome. Thank you so much. It has been fantastic. I hugely appreciate it. All right now after the break, I'm going to be answering a listener's question. So stay with me.

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Welcome back. This is the time where I answer a listener's question. And today's question comes from Bob in Aurora, Illinois. And Bob asks jj, I know you've talked a lot about your son's brain injury. I'd like to know what you've done to help him heal. Alright. So Bob, I'm actually working on putting this all together in a document because there's been a lot of things that we've been doing to help my son heal from his brain injury and some of these things have worked really well, some haven't done so much. So what I'm going to share with you today are some of the biggest needle movers that I've seen that have helped. Now the first thing that we started to do in the hospital was to give him high dose fish oil. And this is one that I would highly recommend a great resource for. This is Dr. Michael Lewis who wrote When Brains Collide. So high dose fish oil, I think the recommended dose There is about 10 grams. We went to 20 grams and then once he was out of the hospital, we went down to 10 grams and then tapered him to 5 grams where he is now four years later. The next thing that we did was hyperbaric oxygen treatments and the recommended dose on those is 3, 30 to 40 of these hyperbaric oxygen treatments. The next thing that we did was neurofeedback and we do that ongoing still today, some neurofeedback and then we also have him on CBD oil that has helped tremendously with stabilizing his mood. And then we are now just starting stem cells that we had harvested. They're growing and they're being injected right into his spine. And we've been seeing tremendous change with that now we're playing around with a copper wire device that has an electromagnetic current that helps heal his brain. So we'll be putting all of that together for you. You can go to GrantVirgin.com right now and get a guidebook of some of the things that we did in the hospital. But again, I am continuing to work on this. This is my life's passion and purpose now is to get more information out, so I will continue to share with that. So make sure that you are part of the community. And if you'd like to submit a question, you can just head over to my Facebook page, JJVirginFanClub and I have a favor to ask. I would hugely appreciate it if you would jump on Stitcher or itunes and leave a review for me. It helps a bunch and be sure to subscribe and share the show with your friends. This is JJ Virgin signing off and reminding you to live courageously.

Show up, step up.

You are stronger than you think.

Hello listeners, this is Anne Boeckle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next reading. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately, and I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.