How to Rewire Your Brain for Lasting Health with John Assaraf

How you talk to yourself makes a difference with what happens in your body. I ended up with severe ulcerative colitis, so I had ulcers in my colon. They were bleeding, and I had no bowel control. Half the time I would shit in my pants. They said, if it doesn't get better, we're gonna have to remove part of your colon because it's precancerous. What? I'm 22. What do you— what do you mean remove my colon?

I've never even heard of that.

And so I was filling my brain with the fact that my body has the power to heal itself. 5 weeks After I did this every day, all symptoms were gone.

Wow. John Assaraf, about time you got on the show.

JJ Virgin.

Gosh, I had to come to San Diego and track you down.

I know, it's so great to see you.

It's great to see you too. It's not often enough, but here we are in San Diego. Longtime friends. Yes. Like what, 15 years? 15, 20 years. It's been a bit.

And many friends that are mutual.

Yes, lots of mutual friends. Now you've written 14 books.

Wow.

14 books, a couple of New York Times bestselling books. You've been in a load of movies, including The Secret. You've built quite a few, like, what, 5 multimillion-dollar businesses?

Yeah. Built some companies using, you know, the best in getting my brain and my mind, you know, focused on the right things and then obviously doing the things that are necessary to achieve the success.

Yeah. So, I mean, how did you flip into— because I know you were starting in things like real estate and then you shifted over and now you are like heavy into neuroscience? What was the shift?

A lot of times the messes that we have in our life become our message. The real shift happened, and this going back quite some time, I was 22 years young, so literally 42 years ago. I ended up with severe ulcerative colitis, so I had ulcers in my colon. And at the time, the doctors were basically saying, you know, take these pills. I was taking 25 salazopyrin pills a day. When it got worse, I had ulcers in my colon, they were bleeding, and I had no bowel control. So if If I had to go to the bathroom, it was like, oh my God, where's the bathroom? And half the time I would make it to the bathroom. Half the time I would shit in my pants or wherever I was. So it was getting more serious. And so I was taking these pills to reduce the inflammation. When it got worse, then the doctor said, well, you got to do these cortisone enemas morning and night to reduce the inflammation.

I've never even heard of that.

Yeah, cortisone enemas. So not fun. Imagine a 22-year-old guy having to do a cortisone enema on himself every day, twice a day. Uh, when that got worse, um, I started doing a monthly session at the hospital with my doctor. His name was Dr. Wu, and they did something called a sigmoidoscopy, which is where they insert this very, very long tube as far in your butt as they can to look inside to see, you know, how bad is it? How bad are the ulcers? How bad is the inflammation? And it was getting so bad that they said, if it doesn't get better, we're going to have to remove part of your colon because it's precancerous. And I'm like, what? I'm 22. What do you, what do you mean remove my colon? And right at that time, I was watching one of the TV shows with my mother, and she was watching a show with a bunch of doctors on there talking about this thing called psychoneuroimmunology. A long time ago. And it's just basically the mind-body connection. And I'm like, you know, glued to the TV because they're saying, you know, you can control your mind, you know, to help you heal yourself and get better.

Was this like a PBS show?

It was. I don't know what she was watching, but I was like, what do you mean you can heal your body of disease? Right? And they talked about, obviously, diet and nutrition and reduction of stress. Got that. I understood that. But they also talked about, you know, using tools like self-talk. How you talk to yourself makes a difference with what happens in your body. So if you're saying, I'm sick, I'm sick, I'm sick, this is hurting, this is hurting, this is hurting, you activate and reinforce those patterns over and over and over again. And so the cells behave the way that your language patterns dictate, because the language patterns dictates how you feel. How you feel is an emotion. Emotion is just the energy in motion. And so at that time, I was about a year and a half in, like, being so sick. I was like 160 pounds. I'm like 200 now. Yeah, I was gaunt, no energy, because I was afraid of eating, because if I ate, it meant that I couldn't control my bowel movements. So I started this regimen— exercise, nutrition. Yes, I ate better. I slept better. And so that I knew 42 years ago. But I created this affirmation, you know, a language pattern. And it says, my body and all its organs were created by the infinite intelligence in my subconscious mind. It created all my muscles, tissues, bones, and organs, and it has the power to heal me. I am perfectly healthy now. My colon is healthy. My mind is healthy. My body is healthy. I am perfectly healthy. I would read that 10, 15 times a day. I then recorded it and I would listen to it as I was going to work, as I was coming back. And so I was filling my brain with the fact that my body has the power to heal itself. And we know that's true today. Okay.

But back then, were you thinking as you were doing this, were you kind of thinking, were you totally bought in or you're— or you still kind of going, well, maybe this will work, maybe what the hell? Like, what was going on in your mind? It seemed like bullshit.

It. Like, I mean, it seemed like talking to yourself is going to heal you.

I still think of when I first heard about self-talk and went, all right, okay. I'm like, I like myself.

I was in so much pain and discomfort, and I didn't want to go down the path of having part of my colon removed. So I was willing to try whatever. So I would read this affirmation, I would close my eyes and then listen to the audio version that I had on a cassette tape. And then I would feel as if my body was healing. So instead of focusing on the disease, I would focus on my colon being healthy. I would focus on being able to eat and have energy and do the things that I wanted to do. And it took some practice to think about it, feel it, and then to start to visualize it. And 5 weeks after I did this every day, 5 weeks. Now, I was sick for a year and a half. 5 weeks after, all symptoms were gone. Everything was gone. Normal bowel movements, energy. I could eat whatever I wanted. And so between the diet, the exercise, the sleep, and the self-talk and emotional regulation and focusing on being healthy versus being sick. That shift transformed my health and my life. And so I was like, hey, what's going on here? Right? Like, so I was like, what else can I use this for? And so then I started to use it in my business. At the time, I was a 22-year-old real estate agent, but I wanted to make more money. I wanted to become an entrepreneur. So I started to use visualizations and affirmations and mindfulness and meditation. I started to add different, you know, what I call today are inner sizes, ways to strengthen, you know, my mindset and strengthen my self-image, strengthen my identity, strengthen my habits. So they were empowering, positive, and constructive, building me up.

I'm trying to think back then, because I found I had my first mentor at 30 who really taught me all these things, but there wasn't a whole lot going on back then. I think there was like Wayne Dyer and— but there wasn't— it's not like now where—

yeah, Dennis Waitley, Wayne Dyer, Zig Ziglar. Dennis Waitley, um, back in the late '60s actually was working with Neil Armstrong, okay, uh, getting him prepared to go to the moon. And as you can imagine, you know, if you're in a spaceship Everything can go wrong. So you can lose electrical power, you can lose lighting, you could lose everything. And so the astronauts had to create a mental map of every part of the cockpit so they could do it blindfold or with their eyes closed or in total darkness, because obviously you're in deep space. And so back then, Dennis Waitley said that Whatever you practice creates permanent patterns. So they were practicing what to do in good times and in challenging times. And what they believed back then was that you're creating these new mental maps, these neuromaps of possibilities. What happens to a lot of people, whether it's in business and/or with health, is they achieve results. They get used to those results. Those results become habits. And then our brain goes on autopilot. It's something called automaticity. Our brain goes on autopilot to just play out those patterns like software on a computer, on your phone. So when I was sick, I kept focusing on, I'm so sick, I'm not feeling good. Oh my God, I'm not feeling— I don't have energy. I'm afraid I'm going to go to the bathroom, afraid of being embarrassed. So I was afraid.

And so you were creating your reality.

I was creating, reinforcing it, reality, and reinforcing it. Not realize it was totally out of ignorance.

How many people do that?

Everyone. I mean, everyone does.

And we all do it. Even those of us who are positive thinkers, because you don't realize that some of the things that are at the playback loop, right?

Some of the research that just came out of the University of Toronto 18 months ago around habits, but more importantly, around self-talk. They did a study. I think it was about 80 or 100 people. And they realized that 80% of the average person's thought in the study was negative, disempowering, or destructive. They also came up with a new number that most people aren't aware of, 6,250. That's the amount of thoughts we have a day. So imagine if 80% of a person's thoughts, the ones that are percolating from their memory center, their subconscious mind. Imagine if 80% are negative, that's 5,000 negative thoughts a day. 90% are repeated week after week. Now, it may not sound that significant, but when you reinforce a negative self-talk pattern, you reinforce a negative emotion. You're training your brain that this is the norm and the default of being. And healing, whether it's getting into better shape, developing new eating or exercise or lifestyle habits, requires new habits. And the research shows that it takes between 66 days and 365 days of spaced repetition to create and reinforce a new habit so the old habit atrophies or goes away.

And by spaced repetition, what do you mean?

If you do some today, learn from what you did today, implement a good positive, you know, you know, thought, emotion, and behavior. You have to add the behavior to, to really create that habit. And then you come back tomorrow and you do a little bit tomorrow, and then you come back the next day and do a little bit the next day, and you come back the next day. The rule I teach my students is don't get into any of my training unless you're prepared to give me 100 days to change the thought, emotion, and behavioral pattern of who you are today and what you do today.

And how many of those things could you change at once? Is it focusing on one?

Yeah, or 1 to 3, depending on how significant it is. So when we're talking about health, I mean, it could be, you know, very, very complex. So when we're dealing with health, you know, we have our nutrition. So our eating plan, we have our sleep plan, we have our exercise plan, and then we have our self-image around that. You can work on all of those, but then don't work on changing other habits. So if you're going to work on health, work on health. It's very, very hard to work on health and wealth and relationships and career and business at the same time.

I even pull it to like, let's focus on one thing within that because again, I've just seen it too often, is it's the New Year's Eve resolution that you're going to do all these things which lasts a day and then gets blown up.

And there's a reason for that, you see. So 40 years ago, 30 years ago, 25 years ago, we really didn't understand the 3 core networks in the brain and the circuits that turn on or off, like the motivational circuit, the doubt circuit, the stress circuit, fear circuit. But now we know that these circuits turn on or off. Well, the circuits are electrical activity that release neurochemicals, and we're either releasing cortisol, we're releasing dopamine, serotonin, or oxytocin. And if we don't understand that self-talk is one of the ways that we release these neurochemicals and it affects behavior and it affects what I do or don't do, then we're just trying harder than we need to. I think when we batch let's say, health and nutrition, I think we say, okay, in order for us to really use our brain the way it's meant to be used, there are several things that we need to put in play, almost like a checklist. If you get into your car, you open the car door, you sit down, you get your seat right, you put your key in the ignition, you turn it on, you put into park, you put into drive, or you put into reverse, you get onto the street or the highway, and there's a process. Well, our brain needs these checklists to have a process to follow so that we have the certainty that we can actually achieve the goal. So let's say somebody wants to get healthier. All right. Since I know your industry a little bit, so he wants to get healthier. Uh, the first thing we want to start off with was like, what does that mean? Like if you were already healthier, um, what would your physique look like? What would your energy level look like? What would your sleep look like? How would you tell that you are healthier? So the first thing that we want to do to achieve goals versus set goals, because everybody sets goals, is we want to understand that we want to start off with a vision that we want to move towards. So how do we set a vision to move towards? So if we were sitting here 3 months from now or 6 months from now or for a year from, a year from now, and you achieved this vision, explain it to me in as much detail as possible.

Now, question on this one. Yeah. And it just, it takes me back to the days when I was on Dr. Phil, because he would literally say to people, this is your get real weight. You can't be what you were in high school. And I kept thinking, you could be better. You've just put an upper limit problem on these people. But we all put upper limits on ourselves. So when someone's talking about achieving goals, how do you help them not create those, the get real goals of, of Dr. Phil? Yeah. Rather the goals that are what they really want that they're afraid to even admit to themselves.

One of the things I ask all of my students in whatever, you know, stuff I teach 'em on business growth and making more money and being healthier. Is first and foremost, let's, let's say we have a goal. Second question, is that goal achievable? Like, are there people like you that have achieved it? Your age, your situation, that have achieved it? If the answer is yes, it means it's achievable. So the next question is, if the answer is yes and it's achievable, somebody has a blueprint for how they did it. So how to achieve it is never the problem, especially with AI today. Where I can say, here's the goal I have here. I'm 64 years old, I weigh this, my energy is this, my sleep is that, I got a problem with this, I eat too much of that, not enough of that, and my goal is blank. I can go to ChatGPT, I can say, based on all of my circumstances, my medical background, the amount of time I have or don't have, my, my lack of, or my knowledge base, help create a week-by-week doable blueprint for me to follow. Could I do that? Yes or no? So if it's doable and I could find out exactly the, the diet in a healthy way, the exercise, the sleep, the stress reduction, et cetera, if I can map it out, then it's doable. Now we come back to a question I ask every single human being that I come encounter with, or I encounter that really wants to achieve goals versus You know, set goals. Are you interested in achieving this goal or these goals, or are you committed to achieving them?

And I love that statement.

Yeah. And most people look at me like, huh? What am I interested? Am I committed? And I say, okay, listen, when somebody's interested, they have motivation. They want to do it. Uh, they may even know how to do it, but they tend to come up with stories, reasons, and excuses.

I always hear it. They say, I'm going to try that.

Why they can't, or why it's not the right time, or it's too difficult, or they're too old, or they come up with a story, a reason, or excuse. And so then I asked them, I said, listen, which is going to be bigger this time? Your stories, which sound reasonable to you, your excuses, which is the inflammation disease of choice, excusitis, the facts that surround your certain circumstances right now. I can't because— and there's a fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. Which is going to be bigger? Your stories, reasons, or excuses, or your commitment? See, committed people find a way. They become more resourceful in the absence of resources. They learn how to regulate how they think or what they think about. They learn to recognize that I have these emotions and I have these thought patterns and I have these habits that are keeping me stuck in this comfort zone. And I may not be happy there, but I'm there. So if you're committed, there's a way. If you're interested, nobody can help you, period. So before you say, you know, I'm going to do this, Vision first, some goals that we can set for this week, 2 weeks, 4 weeks, so we can track and measure. And the smaller the changes are initially, the better. The smaller the changes are, the better.

Why? So give, give an example of a small change and then I'd love to hear why.

Sure.

For, uh, or actually tell us why and then let's, let's break it down to give some examples.

Yeah, of course. When we're looking to be healthier, release weight, gain more muscle, have more energy, that's an outcome that we want. But we are all conditioned to the food we eat now, to the exercise we do or don't do, to the sleep we get or don't get, to the stress levels we have or we don't. We're all in this habit loop, right? We call it a habit loop, or in some cases, habit hell.

All right.

And so in order to get my brain to want to work with me, what I want to do is give it some goals and give it some easy steps to create a little release of dopamine. Okay? We want a little bit of the stress of the uncertainty because we need a little bit of the cortisol for a little bit of that extra energy boost. And we want to have a little bit of the dopamine because it's the anticipation of the reward. The dopamine is not Okay, the reward. We get more dopamine released. The feel-good neurochemicals is released through the insula and nucleus accumbens in the brain as the anticipation of maybe walking for a minute, of eating one really good meal today, going to bed 30 minutes earlier today. So when we give our brain the vision and the goal and the why we want to achieve, because we're committed, because we want to be healthy and happy and be there for our kids or grandkids or husband or wife. I want to look in the mirror and feel good about myself. And then we say, okay, can I start off with 3 minutes of movement in the morning? Can I make sure I start off with one healthy meal? And can I just go to bed like 30 minutes earlier today so I get the rest that I need? And if we reduce it to the ridiculously small, we reduce the resistance of our brain fighting us. Our brain does not like change. So the more changes we give it, the harder something is, the more our brain will resist it. So I say, listen, why not focus for the first 30, 60 days? Let's focus on developing some empowering, constructive new habits. And I say, at the beginning, the habit is more important than the intensity or complexity. So if I build the right habits, the habits will build me. But if I don't take the time, 66 days to 365, to develop empowering habits, thought, emotions, and behaviors, I will meet resistance all the time. And that is based because the number one priority of the brain, other than safety and survival, the other number one priority— well, I guess we can't have two number one priorities, but conservation of energy, right? 25% of all the food that you and I eat or drink that we consume, our brain is using. Glucose is what our brain operates on. So the more we have to give our brain— well, do this. I want you to exercise for an hour, and I want you to cut your caloric intake by this and change from eating this to eating that, and then go to sleep an hour and a half earlier and do an hour of meditation. Our brain goes, are you kidding me? It's just too much. So we want to keep reducing the ask. Until the ask is so small we can't say no. I'll give you an example of this. When my mother was 12 years old, the Russians were invading Romania, where she was born, and she had to flee Romania with her 8-year-old sister, and they were in a refugee camp in Cyprus for 3 years. And needless to say, she was traumatized in every way imaginable. So she was a manic depressive, and she would be depressed for years at a time. So in her 80s, she had some health issues. And I used to go to Montreal where she lived before she died every 90 days. And I'd go, my brother would go, my sister lived there. And this one day I knew she had been depressed for 2 years and she was getting overweight, lethargic, was sleeping most of the time. So I arrived from San Diego, I come into her retirement home, I go, hey, Mom. I give her a hug and a kiss and she's hardly smiling and she just gives me the cheek and gives me the cheek. I'm sitting there saying, how you doing? How you been? And she doesn't even want to answer me. And maybe about 15 minutes in there, I said, okay, I've got to get her off of this sedentary conditioning and behavior. So I said, hey, Mom, take your hands and move them like this, and let's do 10 of these finger presses. She goes, no. I'm like, Mom, Mom, come on. I just came from San Diego, and I'm trying to talk her into it. No. I said, okay, just do one hand. I said, just do this 5 times. No. She's getting angry with me. I said, Mom, do you love me? She goes, of course I love you. Would you just do one thing for me? I said, what? I said, you're left-handed. I said, just take your left finger one time. Just do this. Boom. Like that. She goes, fine. She's angry. She does one time. I said, thank you, Mom. I love you so much. I said, your 4 other fingers are a little bit jealous now. "Let's just do the left hand." She looks at me, she's angry, and she goes, "1, 2, 3, 4." I said, "Mom, your right hand's a little bit lonely now. You can't do on the left hand and not the right hand. That's what they taught us in math when I was a little boy." She's angry and she goes, "1, 2, 3, 4, 5." I said, "Great. Now put your hands over your head." "No." She would not do any more day 1. I come back day 2. I was there for 2 weeks. Day 2, "Mom?" Hey, let's just do what we did yesterday. So we do left hand, right hand. She did it reluctantly. And then I said, now just move one hand up and then the other hand up. Guess what she did? One hand up, the other hand up. Great. That was day 2. By 2 weeks in, the day I was leaving. So 2 weeks in, after the first week, I had her standing up and sitting in her chair. Okay. After the first week, in the second week, we were outside in the hallway in her retirement home with her walker, walking one time back and forth in the hallway. By the time I left, she was downstairs on the bike at 85 years young. And it all started with one finger. 2 and a half years she wouldn't do anything. Wow. So what did— what's the lesson there? Something consistently that's small and maybe seem inconsequential activates the right neural networks and patterns. So the fact that she did it, she got a little hit of dopamine, but we had a lot of cortisol there to begin with.

Mm-hmm.

And then the fact that she had a little bit of dopamine, then she was anticipating and looking forward to feeling better and moving and not being, you know, in a vegetable state. So reducing it to the ridiculous of, I'm prepared to do this. For 100 days, not for a weekend. Most people who want to get healthy either do it for a reason or a season. And I say, why? Why not develop the habit that you can build the habit, then the habit will build you for the rest of your life. And so I prefer you to doing less to start with consistently than more to start with, and you do it sporadically or you quit. And that's because the brain does not like change., and the brain wants to conserve energy. So let's work with how the brain works. So we need, what do I want to achieve? When do I want to achieve it by? How am I going to achieve it? And I need a why, a reason why that's bigger than the why not. And if I can have those 4 things, I'm activating different parts of my brain. And then if I go from general behavior, which is involving hippocampus part of the brain, the amygdala part of the brain for emotional regulation. With spaced repetition, I start moving the behavior pattern into the cerebellum and the seat of habits. And now the habits start to run automatically.

How long does that take?

I tell my students, just give me 100 days. Give me 100 days of 15 minutes a day. Just gimme 100 days so we can get the mindset right. Get the emotions aligned of what you want. And then if we take the action, that's where the learning and the real neural network strengthens.

You did this progression with her, which seemed to go like a big snowball going down the hill. It started very slowly and then boom, picked up all the speed.

It was a big snowball going up the hill first.

Yeah, it wasn't going anywhere. It was a push up the hill first. But for someone who is maybe working on changing their diet, where we see them do ridiculous stuff. It's like they do way too much at the beginning and drop out. You know, I'm looking at going, all right, what if we just started getting— I think I might have done this to you. Let's just get a little more protein in your diet, John. So how do you know, though, how to progress so you don't push too quickly?

And then, yeah, for people that are watching right now, don't, don't know is, uh, let me see, about 17 years ago I was 243 pounds. 30-plus percent body fat, hypertensive, borderline diabetic, fatty liver, and a ton of visceral fat. And I was 48, and I'd called JJ, and we were friends. And I said, JJ, I need some help. And I said, I want to, for my 50th birthday, get into the best shape of my adult life. And she looked at me. You know, it's like, you want to lose that weight and gain the muscle? I said, yeah, so help me with a process. And you had me do the elimination diet first because I had some allergies and stuff like that. Um, but we did the elimination diet. Um, I decided I was going to become a vegan, which I did for about 10 months.

Not my idea.

Which is not your idea. I became a vegan, and that worked really, really well for me. And then I added, uh, I became a pescatarian.

Now we got— now we're getting some better—

now we're getting quality protein in there. Wow. And then I followed a process, and I said I was going to give it 100 days to see results. 100 days to see results. And I started to get the results within, you know, a week.

But with an elimination diet, right, right away, fast.

Um, and, and that began the process. Okay, I'm making progress. Um, I'm getting some of the results now. I didn't expect to lose 45 pounds of fat, which I did. I didn't expect to gain all that muscle afterwards, which I did. But I started off small with a commitment to my health 2 years out. It wasn't even for my 48th birthday, it was for my 50th birthday. And by building these proper nutrition and exercise and sleep habits and obviously food and what I eat, Um, it's been 16 years now. You know, I'm at my, I'm actually at a better weight with more muscle than I had in high school.

Which proves my point. You know, there is this information going around the internet and, and the stats are the stats. The stats say that starting at around age 30, we start to lose up to 1% of our muscle mass a year. Yeah. It's like 3 to 8% per decade. However, I did a DEXA at 39 and I did another one at 59. And weight, body fat, muscle mass were exactly the same. Yeah. The reason that we lose that is not because of aging, it's because of sitting.

Sitting, sedentary.

Right.

And we don't have any more muscle. It's our behaviors.

Right. So the fact, I just love that you've actually gotten better, that you're in better shape than you were in your, you know, 20s.

Better shape than in my 30s, 40s, and 50s. For sure. I had a goal to have a six-pack at 60. I got my six-pack at 60. I have a goal of having an eight-pack at 65. Not for the eight-pack. It's to prove to myself that you can do it, right?

It's what you had to do. They always say it's the person you had to become that got that goal.

It's to bust the myth. And now we have a little bit more understanding of the mechanics, the mental and emotional mechanics of it. And we certainly have a lot more information on exercise and nutrition.

There's no shortage of that. That's not the challenge. There's no shortage. This is the shortage, I think, is really how do you make it stick?

Yeah.

What, what would you say to the people though? Cause you always hear it's 21 days to break a habit.

That's old. That's what is that? 1960s, 1970s information.

Um, I think that's really old. Set up people to fail.

Yeah. It's old. I would say it takes about 3 to 4 weeks. To get a baseline habit where, where the habit starts to want to do you, right? I'll give you an example. I do something at the beginning of the year just to challenge my neural patterns, my habits. So 2 years ago I said, what am I going to do this year? I said, well, I'm going to start brushing my teeth with my left hand. I've been brushing my teeth for 62 years with my right hand, or however long I've been brushing my teeth. So I started to use my, you know, put toothpaste on with the right hand instead of the left hand, um, you know, hold the thing and put in my mouth. And the first week I've got toothpaste all over the place, and I'm coming out of my mouth, I got toothpaste all over me. I only did it for 100 days, right? And it got easier and easier and easier with the 100 days. But something interesting has happened. I'm still brushing my teeth with my left hand. Because the habit that I built over the 100 days, it didn't want to let me go back to brushing with my right hand, even though it's still easier with this hand. I'm right-hand dominant. But every time I try to take the handle into my right hand now, my left hand grabs it. Is my brain saying, "No, you brush your teeth with your left hand now." And I can observe the habit controlling the thinking and the behavior. So when we're talking about how do we develop the habits, so I like to use a series of affirmations around what it is that I want my brain to develop. I like to use a series of visualization, and it's simply closing your eyes and seeing yourself with the new exercise routine being something you enjoy and love and can do with gratitude, seeing yourself enjoying the food plan that you've chosen for yourself. And it's not work. This is part of my identity. This is how I eat now that I want to be this healthy, vibrant, energetic person. So it's not a diet. Like, I don't look at things as diet. Because a lot of people go on a diet, they might lose weight, not fat, but they lose weight. They get to the weight, then they rebound and gain it all back. So make a decision that'll serve your life. So now let's get the language patterns, the right affirmations, which is just words that I'm affirming in my mind. And if I repeat anything over and over and over again with spaced repetition and a little bit of emotion feeling it, then I'm firing those neurons and reinforcing those neurons. If I do them once in a while, it doesn't work. But if I do it over the course of 100 days, it can't not work.

And over the course of 100 days, how often do you need to do it? And every day, the other piece of it is that emotional piece of it. Yes.

Like without that emotional piece of it, Well, that's why I said we want to have the affirmation. If you were a Hollywood actress and somebody paid you $1 million for 100 days of pretending you're in the best shape of your life, the way you speak to yourself, the way you eat, the way you sleep, the way you exercise. If they paid you $1 million to talk that way, to emotionalize what it would be like and then to behave that way. Could you do it? Of course you could. Hollywood actors and actresses are the Olympic athletes of pretending or practicing a role until the role becomes them. Well, if I'm going to say some words to myself, I'm so happy and grateful that being healthy is easy for me. If you add a little bit, it's easy for me. What most people don't think is just words coming out of my mouth. But every word in the brain fires electrical activity and releases the neurochemical associated with the word or the sentence. So if I say, this is so hard, I just released hard neurochemicals, and then every cell in my body feels what I just said. Then it thinks about what it feels. It feels what it thinks about. Then I'm reinforcing, this is hard.

But one last question around that, because you talked about, what was it, 66?

66 days.

Let's say half a lifetime. No, no, no, but 65, how many negative thoughts or how many thoughts we have?

Oh, 6,250 is the most recent research.

Okay.

And 80% are negative for the average person.

And so beyond those thoughts and a lot of them being negative, how important then Is that happening because of the environment we're in and what we're paying attention to, or is this independent? Like, if someone wasn't reading anything, are a lot of these thoughts happening because they're paying attention to the news, to social media at all? I view it now and wonder if it's worse.

The news and social media reinforces the negative experiences we've had in our life, the negative stories. Our parents, teachers that told us this is hard, this is easy, this is how long this takes, you're not capable of doing that. And then your own experiences where you may have had some trauma and/or negative experiences. And let's say you went on a diet and you lost weight and you gained it back. Oh my God, it's so hard to keep it off. It's not hard to keep it off. It's hard to keep it off if you don't have the right process and expectations. So if your expectation is that it's hard, it becomes hard. Mm-hmm. If your expectation is that it's easy, uh, then it becomes easy. So what we wanna do is get the right language patterns that we're practicing. It's almost like we're gonna plant these new language patterns into our mind, our subconscious mind. We're gonna increase the amplitude of the vibration of the words through, through emotion. Through, like, I'm so happy and grateful for the fact that I am loving how I'm looking and feeling every day. And then, like, yes. Right now, I've just added energy to that. Now, in the beginning of doing this, something happens that everybody needs to be aware of. There's a part of your brain that goes, bullshit, not true. You're not feeling that way. You're tired. You don't have the energy. Understand it's normal. It's the old self, okay, trying to give you a dose of reality of your current circumstances and conditions, and it will try to override the new. Why? Because that's what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to keep you in your comfort zone, even if you don't like it. To conserve energy, to keep you what it perceives is safe. Change in the brain is perceived as a threat. What if I fail again? What if I go and buy these new clothes and then they're stuck in the closet? What if I look great, but then I gain all the weight back? What if negative is a very, very normal process in the brain because we are doing more to avoid downstream consequences that are negative. So our brain is predicting what might happen in the future, but it's releasing those neurochemicals that we feel in the present moment. So we have to be able to pay attention to the negative or disempowering self-talk and just use this word. You hear the voice in your head, just go, Next. It's a thought. Next.

I love that. I was taught early on to snap a rubber band and say, cancel, cancel.

Yeah, cancel, cancel.

Next. I like next better.

So if we think about, we have 6,200 thoughts a day. The majority of them are negative. All of them want to keep us in our comfort zone, just about. So if we hear this negative self-talk, you're too old, this is too hard, just understand your brain is firing those neurons. Your thoughts from your memory, and then you just go next. I like to give people a little visual. Imagine that you have an aquarium, and at the bottom of the aquarium there's a filter, and it's throwing up bubbles into the water, and the fish see all these bubbles, but the bubbles are red or blue. The red ones, 80%, are negative, disempowering, destructive thoughts or emotions. The blue ones are positive, empowering, and build you up. So every time you witness a negative thought or a negative, you feel a negative emotion, just go next and choose a positive thought.

How much can you shift it? I would imagine you're never going to be 100% positive thoughts.

Never. You're never going to not have fear and you're never going to have only positive thoughts. As long as we're growing, our brain is going to predict what might go wrong, what might go wrong mentally, what might go wrong emotionally, what might go wrong physically. And it's going to bring that to you in the form of self- self-talk and emotions.

So it's okay for them to be there because really it's a sign of you playing big enough, going for it. It's just managing those and not—

Yeah. So first and foremost, there's nothing wrong with negative thoughts. There's nothing wrong with negative or disempowering emotions. There's nothing wrong with your habits. You have habits. What the challenge is, is reinforcing the ones that don't allow you to change to the better version of you. So we want to be aware of thoughts. And when we have the disempowering negative one, just go next, replace it with a positive. So what if you could remove that bubble in this aquarium that's red and put in a new positive one? And now you train your brain that when there's a negative thought, replace it with a positive one. When there's a disempowering, a negative emotion, understand that we have 6 core emotions. Stress is triggered when the demand exceeds your capacity. There's nothing wrong with stress. Increase capacity, thing goes away that has caused your stress. So self-talk is where it begins. Awareness of self-talk and switching from what our friend Dr. Daniel Amen said, the automatic negative thoughts or the automatic negative emotions to automatic positive ones. And now we train our brain to shift from this to that. That's the beginning of awareness and being deliberate about evolving ourself. The next part, once we have the emotion of being empowered and I can do this, and in the past I may have felt this, but now I'm feeling this. Now we say, okay, what's the behavior? We have to line up the behavior. And that's the easiest part of the equation because the behavior— like, I can say to you, hey, JJ, I want to achieve this goal. You don't have to do any research. You can just tell me, okay, John, tell me what you're doing now. What are you eating? What are you exercising? What's your sleep pattern? What's this? What's that? And you can in seconds say, okay, what I want you to do this week, on Monday, do this. On Tuesday, do this. On Wednesday, do this. If you have any setbacks, here's what I want you to do. And you can give me the whole plan. So we want to get the mindset right first, including emotions. We want to upgrade the skills of what to do, when to do it, how to do it. And then we want to develop new empowering habits. And if we get the mindset plus the right skillset applied, almost every single result that everybody paying attention to right now is achievable. And it becomes predictable instead of possible. Mm-hmm. I like predictability versus possibility.

All right. Now you've been making some shifts in your business, in your world, and I know you're really doubling down into this, which I think is great. If someone wanted to go deeper in this and said, okay, I get this now, I want some help.

Yeah.

What are some of the ways that you can help them?

So obviously I'm on social media and people can learn from us. We do a lot of events. I developed an app. The first phase of our app is called Innercise. And if you think about Peloton for the mind, right? Peloton, you exercise, you strengthen your cardiovascular system and your muscles. But Innercise for the mind. Why not have ready-made affirmations for health and wealth and losing weight and being energetic and have vitality? Or your mindset or your business or your career or your relationship. So we have over 650 inner sizes that are a combination of cognitive behavior techniques, mindfulness techniques, affirmations in first, first person and third person visualization inner sizes where I guide people through a variety of different visualization exercises.. And so we have our InnerSize app, and that is going to be converting over to our neurofitness platform within the next 2 to 3 months.

Exciting.

And so we're going to be moving everybody over to a platform where there's going to be a few things. Number one, a slew of highly trained AI coaches on very specific topics, whether it's trauma or fear or procrastination or self-sabotage or self-image. And so the AI coaches will be there for you 24 hours a day. We have world-renowned experts on different topics that will be teaching Peloton Live, uh, people like you. Uh, and then we have our, our, our training that, you know, we're gonna give people on a, on a week-by-week basis to help them really strengthen their mind, to help them overcome any of the mental or emotional challenges that they may have. Also to train their brain to achieve goals versus set goals. So that's gonna be the NeuroGym. Neurofitness platform, and it looks unbelievable.

Very exciting. We're going to put everything at jjvirgin.com/innercise. Well, you've been at this a long time and just iterating and growing and iterating and growing. And so this is super— I mean, this is a lot of work.

Here's the thing I believe is God, our creator, whatever you want to call it, created this spectacular specimen, human being. And we're just getting the user's manual for the brain right now. We've had glimpses of it, but we're really starting to understand that we have this, I think, like a $100 billion, a trillion-dollar organism. I like to call it an organism versus an organ because it's growing. It's growing and developing. So I like to call it an organism. But we don't have the user's manual for how do I deliberately and consciously just evolve myself? Whether it's through language patterns, emotion, focus, and all of the different methods that are available right now. I like to think that just like the body has muscles, the brain has neuromuscles. And if we can strengthen our neuromuscles, we can perform at a higher level. And so I've devoted my research, my practice, and the work that I do to helping people use their brains to achieve their goals and to achieve more of their potential and to release the childhood traumas or the adult traumas, to strengthen their resolve, their grit, their resiliency, to strengthen their self-image so they feel worthy and smart enough and good enough and deserving enough. These are all nothing more than reinforced neural patterns in the brain right now. But what if we can refire and rewire new neural patterns that override the old ones. You upgrade your cell phone with new software. You upgrade your car's software. Why not operate your own human software? And we now know how to do it better than ever before. So I want to bring this gift to the world. I've got over 100,000 students that have been inner-sizing with me for many, many, many decades, or a couple of decades. Anyway. And I want to bring this to the masses in the world.

Amazing. Thank you.

Thank you.

Incredible work. What a legacy.

Thank you.