Supercharge Your Brain Power by Doing These Simple Things feat. Dr. Amen & Jim Kwik

I am so grateful to be here because of course, you know, brains run the world. They run the stock market, the local market, huge corporations, mom and pop shops down the street. Brains run governments, although not that well. Schools. Sexual art program in the Fraser Academy in Vancouver. We teach thousands of kids every year to care about their brains. Churches. We have a brain health program in churches around the world. Families. It's my family and you. Yet most people rarely think about their brains, which is a huge mistake. Because success in anything you do always starts with a healthy brain. After looking at NOW's 115,000 scans and some of the most interesting people in the world, including Joe, it is very clear to me that when your brain works right, you work right. And when your brain is troubled for whatever reason, a head injury, an infection, mold exposure, you're going to have trouble in your life. With a healthy brain, people are happier, physically healthier because they make better decisions, wealthier because they make better decisions. And they're more successful in everything they do. When your brain is not healthy, people are sadder, sicker, poorer, less successful. So your competitive advantage or your disadvantage is the actual physical functioning of your brain. But let's be clear, you're in a war for the health of your brain. Everywhere you go, someone is trying to shove bad food down your throat that will kill you early. The real weapons of mass destruction are processed pesticide sprayed, highly glycemic, low fiber food like substances. The clown and the king have killed more people than ISIS has ever dreamed. And these food companies use neuroscientists. They use trick to hook your pleasure centers. Because you know this woman would never look this way if she ate that. Tech companies create addictive gadgets that hook our attention and distract us from our loved ones. New study from Microsoft. The attention span in humans is now 8 seconds. A goldfish is 9. This is evolution going the wrong way. Study from the Harvard Business Review said that only 10% of us are high in both focus and energy, the two things that drive success. 90% of people are without one or the other. Which is why in your bag I put our Focus and energy supplement. This is the one I hate now that I'm 61, because it's very clear to me after doing a study with 8,000 people, your brain gets less and less active as you age. Typical 55 year old brain with lots of wrinkles. Worse at 82. But here's a friend of mine who actually lives in Phoenix. At 82, she has a stunningly beautiful brain. Brain aging is much more about your habits than your age. So here's the program. This is the $250,000 idea. And for you in this room, it's way more than that. If you pay attention to me, you're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. I can prove it. Here's the plan we use at Amen Clinics. First, you got to look at your brain. So baseline brain health assessments. We do a study called SPECT that looks at blood flow and activity. Here's a healthy SC Compared to someone with accelerated aging, someone who has Alzheimer's disease, which we can tell decades before you have any symptoms, someone with a brain injury, someone whose brain's working too hard, such as people who have obsessive compulsive disorder and people who have underactive brains. This one drank way too much. I think of imaging like a map. You know, a picture's worth a thousand words, but a map is. Is worth a thousand pictures. A map tells you where you are and gives you direction on how to get to where you want to go. Without a map, you don't know, and you're lost. And it can cost you your life. The second thing we do is we don't want you to have normal anything. Normal is sick. 51% of the US population at some point in their life will have a mental illness. And if you're fortunate enough to live until you're 85, 50% of you will be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. That's normal. And I don't want any part of it. And Genius Network people don't either. So I want to know your important numbers. And you got a copy of my new book, Change youe Brain, Change youe Life. This program is in there in chapter 19, in detail. The third part is your brain. You know, people go, oh, take my supplement, because it'll give you a great brain. And it has one thing in it, and that just doesn't work.

Why?

Because the brain does not get sick in one way. It gets sick in many different ways. And that's exactly how we get it better. So we take a multiple mechanism approach, from omega 3 fatty acids for inflammation, ginkgo for blood flow, and so on. The last thing, and I'm really proud of this, in 2005, I wrote a book, and I got all sorts of grief for it. It was called Preventing Alzheimer's. You can't do that. But since then, there have been programs at UCLA and Johns Hopkins. Preventing Alzheimer's. I love that. Here's the short course. You want to Prevent Alzheimer's disease in yourself or your family. You have to prevent or treat all of the risk factors that are associated with it. And if you go after obesity, diabetes, heart disease, hormone levels that are not optimized, and all the rest of these, this is how you prevent it. So let me show you how this works. Joe's one of my favorite people. I love Joe having a problem. I called Joe. Having a great day. I'll call Joe. And Joe called me. He's like, my brain's not right. And this was about five years ago, and he got hurt. He had a head injury. Most people don't know that head injuries are major cause of addictions and psychiatric problems. And nobody knows because psychiatrists are the only medical specialists that never look at the organ they treat. How crazy is that? He came, his brain was troubled, and he just. What I love about Joe is he just did everything I said. Imagine if you just did everything he said, where your business would be. And in seven months, his brain is better. Five years later, it's freaking normal. It's healthier than his age. Some of you who've come to my clinic, I'll tell you, your brain looks older than you are, and his looks younger than he is. I love that for him. We also did the world's largest study on active and retired NFL players at a time when the NFL was lying that they had a problem. And we demonstrated high levels of damage in 96% of the players that we study. It's horrible. And, oh, by the way, if you played football at any level, 80% of you have brain damage. But my job, my love, is never to tell you you have a bad brain, unlike the eternal optimist. Well, can we make bad brains better? And in fact, on this program, 80% of our NFL players showed improvement in memory, attention, mood, and sleep. You are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. Here's one of our players, Freddie Dreyer, who said, I replaced a part of my mind that had been lost. My energy and focus are much better. Duvall Love played 20 years as an offensive guard. His brain just looked awful. Year later, it's much better. Oh, by the way, lost 110 pounds. I was pretty excited for him. Now he has a master's degree. He thinks he's really smart. It's really awesome. And so November 3rd, Change youe Brain, Change youe Life, which is in 26 countries. And I'm so proud of this book, but it's old, and so I had to revise it. And I expanded it, and I put all of my best work into this book. So I'm very excited. I called Joe up. I said, joe, how do we get this to the world? He said, well, I have a forum, the Genius crowdsource blueprint. And I. I'm a good student. I just. I do what he tells me to do. So we have a name. I changed my brain and changed my life to win the prize, best video or essay on how you used my work to help your brain and your life. Our goal is a thousand stories, a million more books sold, and the prize is we will pay for you to come to Southern California, get a full evaluation that we pay for. I'll actually do it because I don't do many of them anymore. And we'll give you a year's worth of supplements. And the deadline is February 14, because that's love My Brain day. And the first day, we got 60 entries, so we now have about two. It's been out for, like, four days. So one of them, Steve, writes my rental car confirmation number. And I'm thinking, why do I want to know this? The reason I know is that I'm supernaturally able to remember things that I would never have been able to. And they don't go away. My productivity and creativity is off the charts. I'm able to connect with my wife in ways I've never experienced. And the sexual intimacy is another area of peak performance. I love that. But my favorite one so far is Cheryl. My brain was broken because of your work. I went from being homeless and hopeless without the custody of my three children to being an RN on a busy surgical trauma unit in a stable relationship. But most importantly, I'm able to be a good mother to my children. You are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. I can prove it.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it out absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So what I want to do just. Is just share with you just eight tips, maybe principles, if you will, just really remind you of what you're doing when you do it. Well. So I want just everyone just quick acronym. Just be faster. All right, so be faster. And these will be the just the really quick. How many is that? Eight quick tips and then we'll do our sit down. So the B to learn how many of you came here today like to upgrade your mind? How many of you came here today like to have a better memory? How many of you forgot why you came here today? Have you ever done that? Walk into a room of your own home and just forgot why you're there? Feel absent minded? Senior moments come a little bit early. So the B here stands for believe. If you believe, you can believe you can. Either way. What? You're right. Who said that? Henry Ford said that. I believe all behavior is belief driven. You could learn a technique for how to remember names and maybe we could talk about that in the conversation today. But if you believe, people come to me all the time. They're like today, just right before you start dating. Said Jim, I'm just getting too old. I'm not smart enough. I have a horrible memory and I always say stop. If you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them. Your brain is this incredible supercomputer and your self talk is the program it will run. So if you tell yourself I'm not good at remembering names, you are not likely to remember the name and the next person you meet because you program your supercomputer computer not to. Does that make sense? Right. And again, you know this. And so this is just a reinforcement. Let me show you what a belief is real quick. Stand up and just make some distance between the person next to you. So if you went like this, you could kind of not, you know, take touch anybody. Some of you done this exercise before, shake out your body. All right, notice where your feet are and keep them stationary. I want you to just point forward with your right hand. Your other right hand, sir. All right, right hand. And what I want you to do without moving your feet, turn to your right. Clockwise as far as you could go. And notice the exact point you're pointing at. Okay, Come back center. Put your arms by your side. Empty your hands not in your pocket and take a deep breath. Exhale and just breathe normally. Breathe normally. And if you're comfortable, close your eyes. It'll help you to focus. And I want you. I'm going to take you through a quick 30 second visualization exercise in your mind's eye. I want you to imagine with your arms by your side. See and feel yourself pointing forward again. But this time imagine you're going twice as far as you did the first time. See and feel. Imagine you're going further. If you can't imagine it, imagine you can Imagine it. And then with your eyes closed, see and feel yourself going three times around. Like you're Gumby. You're getting a great stretch. This is a pleasurable thing. You're made out of rubber. See and feel yourself going three times around. What does that feel like? And then one more time with a smile on your face, thinking, what does this have to do with reading faster? See and feel yourself going four times around. 1, 2, 3, 4. All right, open your eyes. Watch this. Open your eyes. Point forward with your right hand. Turn to your right as far as you can. Now go. All right, Clap. If you went further a second time. Have a seat. Have a seat. Now raise your hand just so we see this. So how many people went further a second time? Raise your hand. My question, my quick question for you is, were you physically capable of turning that far the first time? Yes or no? Yeah. Nobody took a yoga class and my eyes were closed. Right, but you're physically capable. Where is the limitation if we're talking about becoming limitless? Where was the limitation if there was one in your mind? And some people say I didn't have a belief on how far I could turn. But how many, how many ideas of certainty do we have in our mind? Right? And so we're going to talk a little bit about mindset and growth. Mindset be able to change limiting beliefs. And I know there are people in this room that are experts at this. But we start with the belief, right? Your mind is always eavesdropping on your self. Talk. The E very quickly is exercise. Exercise and execute. There is a lie. I talk about seven lies to learning and limitless. And a lie for me is a limited stands for everything's an acronym for me. It's a limited idea. Entertained. It's not true that you're too old. It's not true that you're not smart enough. It's not true you have a horrible memory. One of the lies I talk about is that knowledge is one we hear a lot. Knowledge is what is power and is that true knowledge alone. So it has the potential to be power. It becomes power when we what? When we apply it, when we implement it, when we execute, when we exercise. So the bad news, it takes a little. It takes effort to learn how to remember names. But the truth is the good news, it doesn't take as much as you think. But you have to take knowledge, turn it into power. I asked myself three questions to do this throughout the weekend. I would be thinking about this. How can I use this? I'm obsessed with this question. I must ask this question 100 times a day. How can I use this? Second question, why must I use this? Because a lot of information stays in your head. But if you're not acting with your hands, you have to check in with the second H, which is your heart, right? The purpose. Because reasons reap results. If you can't come up with a reason to remember someone's name, you're not going to remember that person's name. It goes from your head to your heart to your hands and ask yourself, why? So how can I use this? Why must I use this? Third question, when will I use this? I think one of the most powerful productivity performance tools we have is in our phones, right? Our calendars. But a lot of times we'll schedule investor meetings, doctor appointments, PTA meetings, but not our own execution. I think for every hour you spend learning something, you're on clubhouse. You have to spend an equal hour implementing. Is that fair? All right, the F. And we'll go through these fast. Forget. As Joe mentioned, there's a lot of power in unlearning things and a lot of us get stuck, right? It's the curse of expertise, they call it. The curse of expertise is somebody who's become an expert. They become more closed minded because they feel like they know all of this. Right? And your mind is like a parachute. It only works when it's what, when it's open. And so I would temporarily forget what you know about a subject so you could learn something new, so you could be able to adapt so you're not tied to the old ways. A lot of people, you hear this all the time, right? It's in our industry also as well where people say they have 30 years of experience, you know, in direct response. But sometimes when you go discover they have one year experience that they've repeated that many times also, right? And so first learn something new. Forget about what you know because the half life information gets shorter and shorter and shorter, right? And so have that open mind. The other thing I would say, forget. Forget about distractions. And that's easy to say, but you know, how many of you multitask a lot, right? And you've seen the research saying, suggesting that most people can't multitask, do two cognitive activities at once. The task switching, which wastes a lot of time, could take 5, 10 minutes to regain your focus on an activity. So when you're here, be here, it could also make more errors when we're trying to multitask. And the third thing, it Uses up a lot of energy. Anyone suffer from like brain fog or mental fatigue? Going, switching, there's a cost energetically you use more brain glucose from going task to task and you're context switching, right? So you're lighting. A certain pattern of your nervous system's lit up and then you're going from this lighting and then coming back, right? So stick on that. And then. So forget about what you know, forget about multitasking. And not to forget the A really quick. The A stands for active. I always think that learning, like life, is not a spectator sport, right? The old 20th century model for education was sit there, be quiet, be lectured to. And the human brain does not learn through consumption as well as it does through creation. Future belongs to the creators, right? And that's what's truly limitless. There's no limit to your creativity, your imagination, our ability to solve problems, but it requires us to be active in our learning. So how can you be more active in your learning? This is very meta right now. How could you be more active in your learning? You could ask questions, you could be taking notes, right? And we did an episode on different ways you could take notes also as well in our podcast, the S stands for state. I want to remind you the next few days that all learning is state dependent. And I'm defining state functionally as a snapshot of your mood, of the mood of your mind and your body. How do you feel? Because the key to a long term memory is information by itself. Do this information, say this information, put your hands out. Information combined with emotions become long term memories. And you know this. How many of you have a song that you could listen to and it could just take you back to when you're a teenager. How many of you. It's a food or a fragrance. Could take you back to when you're a child. The challenge is how do we up the emotion? Is that part of your middle brain when you're talking about emotion and your amygdala also, it's connected to your hippocampus, right? Your memory. So when you could tie emotions, the state you learn something in is a state that you're going to be able to encode it. So your memory has three parts. You encode information, you store it and then you retrieve it. Right? But if you can encode it with emotions. Because we are not logical. People don't buy logically. They buy what? Yeah, they buy emotionally and they justify logically because we're not logical, we are biological. You think about dopamine, oxytocin serotonin, endorphins, and so control your state. Like right now, who controls how you feel? You do, right? Like sit the way you'd be sitting. If you're really interested in what I was saying and really paying attention. Sit the way you'd be sitting right now. Why do you even have to move? But you know that your physiology is going to affect your psychology, right? Okay, so that's your state and you control that. And then finally, the last few letters, T stands for teach. Your intention matters. If you want to learn the information better over the next two and a half days at a meta level, I'd be thinking, how do I teach this to somebody else? How do I teach this to my team? If I have to give a TEDX talk or a 10 minute talk on Monday to my team, how would I go about learning this? They call it the explanation effect. The explanation effect. If you have to explain it to somebody else, you're gonna learn it better, you're gonna focus better, you're gonna ask questions, you're gonna integrate it and then finally the E and the R. The E, I'm going to just, I'm going to call it entry. And entry is really just to enter it into your schedule like we talked about. Because I feel like if you don't put it into your schedule, it doesn't get done. Same as with your workouts, your ice baths, your meditation, you know, the day could escape you and then you don't get to it, you're floating. And so make sure you enter it, you get your studies. And finally the river. This is the retrieval, all right? This is retrieval, review. I'll put two things, the way to learn anything faster. Remember I said learning is not a spectator sport. You don't consume information, you don't push information inside the human brain. You learn it better by pulling it out. So review is spaced repetition interval training. When you separate, take data and you study it and you review it over a period of time spaced like an hour later, a day later, a week later, then you consolidate short to long term memory. So it's wonderful to take lots of notes, how many of you gone to an event. You take lots of notes and then you never see that, you never review those notes again, right? So you could enter going back to the E, your review. The other great way besides the review for R is, is retrieval, active retrieval. And this is a technique where you are quizzing yourself. It's shown in studies to be so much more powerful than reading something twice. You could read something and Then quiz yourself. It takes a lot less time than reading something twice, because usually when you're reading something twice, you're not really learning it. More people are recognizing it, and there's a difference, because that doesn't mean it's here you're recognizing. I've seen this before, but until you quiz yourself, like, after you take notes, you go through it, and then you test yourself, then you're going to get a lot more out of it.

I am so excited to be here because what I get to do is talk about my obsession, which has been the brain. But I want to start with this slide. I saw this recently. If you knew a train was going to hit you, would you get out of the way? So that's going to become very important. It's 1991. I'm a psychiatrist, been a psychiatrist for about 10 years. And I order my first brain spec study. Spec looks at blood flow and activity. It looks at how your brain works. It's different than a CAT scan or an mri. Those are anatomy studies. So we're looking at function. So I'm the director of a dual diagnosis unit, a psychiatric hospital unit that takes care of drug addicts. So this is a healthy brain. This is an addicted brain. And right away, you realize what, why you shouldn't do drugs. It's because they damage your brain. I got so excited about this technology that I scanned everybody I knew, including myself. And when I scanned myself, this is my first scan. I was horrified. I'm like, why is it so bumpy? A healthy brain is fat and beautiful and smooth and even. And I was horrified because I don't drink. I've never used drugs. But I had meningitis when I was in the army when I was 18. And I had a lot of bad brain habits. And what I'm excited about, what our work is all about. Twenty years later, my brain is younger, and it doesn't usually work that way. You literally can change your brain, and when you do, you change your life. Imaging changed everything for my children because, in fact, if you dated one of my daughters for more than four months, you had to come to the clinic and get a scan. It's actually meet the parents. But worse, imaging changed my love life. After being in a long marriage that I wasn't very happy with, I was determined the next woman I would give my heart to, I would first see her brain. And so I got very attached to Tana. And two weeks later, she's in the clinic, she's getting scanned. Her brain is beautiful. Now she Gets to stay. Imaging literally changed absolutely everything I do with my own patients. So the current psychiatric model is you tell the doctor your symptoms, he gives you a diagnosis that actually is just a regurgitation of your symptoms, and then he gives you a medicine to attack the symptoms. So if you're depressed, you get a depression diagnosis, and you get an antidepressant. If you're anxious, you'll get an anxiety disorder. Diagnosis and medicine for that. My favorite to explain this is if you explode intermittently, if you have temper problems, they'll actually give you a diagnosis called intermittent Explosive Disorder that. So think about that ied and then they don't know what to do. And did you know outcomes in psychiatry happen to be no better than they were in the 1950s? So it's psychiatry's dirty little secret. So when I started looking at people's brains, I'm like, oh, my goodness. Scans taught me that depression wasn't one thing. In fact, it's a symptom, that there were many different causes. In fact, giving someone the diagnosis of depression was exactly like giving them the diagnosis of chest pain. And doctors don't give people the diagnosis of chest pain because it doesn't tell you what causes it or what to do for it. And so I've written a number of books. One, my latest one, Healing add, where I talk about seven different types of add. Don't put everybody on a stimulant, because you can make some people much better and a whole bunch of other people dramatically worse. Imaging helped me see the underlying biology behind the symptoms. So was your brain overactive? Was it underactive? Was it toxic, either from substance abuse or alcoholism or an environmental toxin like mold? Or did you have a traumatic brain injury? Traumatic brain injuries are one of the major causes of psychiatric illness, but of course, nobody knows that because nobody's looking at the brains of their patients on a regular basis. Imaging. And this was the beautiful part. This is the heart part of imaging. It decreased stigma.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

I love that because people saw their problems as medical and not moral. It decreased shame, decreased guilt. And the other part I truly loved is the families then got on board because it increased forgiveness. And compassion. We have nothing else in psychiatry that's that powerful or that immediate. Imaging actually completely changes the discussion around mental health. Nobody wants to see a psychiatrist. I mean, how weird is that? I decided I want to be a psychiatrist and now nobody wants to talk to me. You're not going to shrink me. No one wants to be labeled as abnormal or defective. But all of us want better brains. So what if mental health was really all about brain health? Imaging changed everything about my health. Oh my goodness. There are 200 studies now that say as your weight goes up, the actual physical size and function of your brain goes down. Oh my God. That should scare the fat off anyone. This is the biggest brain drain in the history of the United States States. Two thirds of us are overweight. Can you imagine the neurons and the IQ points we're losing? In fact, a couple of years ago I coined this term called the dinosaur syndrome. Big body, little tiny brain, you're going to become extinct. Now I know that's rude, but it's true. And when I read the first study, I lost 30 pounds because I don't want to be a dinosaur. Imaging can change the Alzheimer's epidemic. Did you know Alzheimer's disease is expected to triple in the next 25 years? There's no cure for it on the horizon. If you're fortunate enough to live until you're 85, you have a 50% risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. And the little scary nugget we've learned in the last 10 years, Alzheimer's disease starts in your brain 30 to 50 years before you have any, any symptoms. So if you knew a train was going to hit you, would you get out of the way? This 59 year old woman was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. It's a scan on the right, you can see the whole back half of her brain is deteriorating. Likely she had brain changes in her 20s. I think all of us should be scanned by 50 because treatment works. When early or late?

Early.

And how would you ever know if you were vulnerable unless you looked? Imaging changed everything for the NFL. And my problem with the NFL is if you don't admit you have a problem, you can't do anything to solve it. And imaging really broke the NFL's denial. We did the first and largest study on active and retired NFL players and it just changed everything. So our first study on 100 players, the Blue equals damage across their whole brain. And you know, I think most 9 year olds would figure out it's a brain damaging sport that's not hard. What was really exciting about our work with the NFL was we showed that 80% of our players could rehabilitate their brains on a smart program. Now, how exciting is that? You're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. Now, I hate this graph because I just turned 60 a couple of weeks ago. But it's really clear, based on a study we did with 8,000 people, your brain gets less and less active as you age. So sort of like as your skin falls off your face as you age, the same process is happening in the brain, but it doesn't have to. That's really the exciting. So a typical 82 year old scan on the left, my friend, Doris Rapp scan on the right. Fat, full, beautiful for 82. You know, if something happens to Tana, I'm asking her out. So the most exciting thing I'm going to tell you is you can literally change your brain and change your life. But how would you know unless you looked? So my favorite story to illustrate this is my oldest daughter, Brianne. Always easy, always sweet. But the sad truth is I never thought she was very smart. Had to get her tutors, had to work hard, had her tested, and in 10th grade, she fell apart. She got depressed. She came to me one night in tears and she said, dad, I just don't think I can be as smart as my friends. And it broke my heart. Next day, scanned her at the clinic and I'm like, oh my God. I cried when I saw this because what it indicates she had really low energy, low blood flow in her brain. I knew how to fix it. I mean, that's really what made me so sad because I had been fixing people's brains for years. The next day on just a little tiny bit of targeted medication for her was much better. Three months later, this is a girl who never got one A in her life. The next three months later, straight A's. The next ten years, straight as. So the ultimate question is, which brain do you want? Which brain do you have of these? And how would you ever know unless you looked.

So you're a swimmer. One thing I and you mentioned, you know, as you got, you used to run in the beginning. I have to bring this up and I didn't have it as a question. But what I found when we were talking, when we went out to lunch in Tucson, is that you were a fan of Dr. John Sarno's work when it comes to physical pain. And I'm a huge believer, I think the vast majority of the way that Pain is treated and diagnosed is wrong. And I lived in chronic pain for most my adult life, which, the way Sarno would describe what he called tms. In the beginning he called it tension myositis syndrome. Then it became tension myoneuro, then the mind body syndrome. And you're an expert in this area. And he said that the pain is caused by oxygen deprivation and brought on by repressed emotions, predominantly anger and rage. And so Steve Ozanich, who wrote recent books on it, he sent you some of his books. Could you explain that from your standpoint about how much the mind and emotional state states, you know, affect the physical body?

Well, to me, this is one of the great limitations of conventional medicine, is that it is totally stuck in the biomedical model which sees only that which is physical as being real. And in that model, if you observe a change in a physical system, the cause has to be physical. The idea of non physical causation of physical events is not allowed. And for that reason, all of the whole realm of mind body medicine is viewed with great suspicion by conventional science and medicine. And that enormously limits their ability to manage these conditions. With back pain particularly, one of the most striking facts about it is that you can see, you can look at X rays and scans of people that look so horrible, you can't imagine that they are not crippled by pain and they have no symptoms whatever. On the other hand, you can look at scans and X rays of people that look completely normal and the people are disabled by pain. So there's a very low correlation between physical findings and subjective experience. And that's one of the things that Sarna is based on. So this is a major component of integrative medicine. I call it whole person medicine, where you don't exclude the mind. That's like, it's key. Let me tell you one story. A couple weeks ago, I was in Japan and I spent time in Okinawa, which is one of my favorite places. When I was doing research for my book Healthy Aging, I made a number of trips there because Okinawa has had the highest concentration of centenarians in the world. And it's very interesting to look at their. What is it about that? It's awful hard to tease all those things apart. It's a tropical Pacific paradise with clean air and water. The Okinawan diet is one of the most interesting diets I've ever seen. Very different from mainland Japanese diet, but incredible variety of sea and land vegetables, unusual foods. Okinawans get great physical activity all the time, not by going to gyms and using exercise machines. They're calling in fish nets and carrying water and chopping wood and hoeing in the garden and stuff like that. But I think especially there is an enormous influence of the way that aging is thought of in that culture. The old people in Okinawa are honored. They're living treasures. They're made part of all community activities. One story I collected there, which I think is very telling, is that a common cause of sibling fighting in traditional Okinawan society is over who is going to get to take care of the. The aging parents. Very different from here. Anyway, I was in. There's a village in Okinawa called Ogimi, which is celebrated as the longevity village. I had been there a number of times, but I went back this time, and they paraded out a number of their old peep centenarians, which they do. And all of them were asked what was the secret of their longevity. And one of the things that they all said was, eat every. Interesting. However, in the past couple of years, Okinawan longevity has plummeted, and now Hong Kong has surpassed them, which is hard for me to believe. And the fall in Okinawan longevity is entirely attributed to McDonald's, that there has been a sudden appearance of American fast food, and people go for it. So when these people say eat everything, I don't think they meant McDonald's. I think it was their traditional vibes.

But how.

How dramatic to see this change in such a short time.

No doubt.

Wow, that's fascinating.

One woman who was 102, I think another secret that she had, which I've started to practice. She says, you want to move your fingers all the time. She was always doing things like this. She said, it's very good for the brain.

I want to translate this into why someone should do it, because one of the biggest obstacles that people will say is, well, I don't have time if they've never done it before. And that was clearly one of my objectives and obstacles, was how am I going to take 20 minutes once a day, let alone twice a day to meditate? I got so many other things to do. And so since so many entrepreneurs and business owners and, frankly, busy people, even though I think at this stage in life, it's sort of a busy world we live in, if you live in America and with access to so much content and so much knowledge and electronics, that people are constantly connected. So I think we're more connected electronically than ever before in human history, but more disconnected as humans. And so there's. A few years ago, I was at ted, the TED conference in Vancouver, and I Saw Ray Dalio. He had spoken earlier that day, and I had gone up to him and I knew a couple people that were friends of his. So I immediately, like, mentioned these people. And so I started talking with him. And so we. We chatted for a few minutes. And one of the things that I had asked Ray and. And so people that don't know Ray, he wrote the book Principles. He's a billionaire, very successful guy. And I said, out of all the things that you've done, all the things that you've learned, what has had the greatest impact on your success as a person, as a human? And he said, by far, doing transcendental meditation, doing tm. Not just meditating, but specifically tm. That's what he said to me. And so I want to mention that and I want to highlight that because this is a guy who is a billionaire. He is a very successful person. And what he had told me was his. The, you know, the. The most valuable thing to his growth and success had been meditating. Now, we didn't go into how that translated into money, how that translated into stuff, but I wanted to bring that up. And so I wanted to ask you, like, there are people that are gonna be like, okay, that sounds good, but there's. I'm a mother, I'm busy. I am a father, I have a business. I. I have a lot of obligations. How does someone meditate, you know, 20 minutes twice a day, when I can barely even get through 10% of the stuff I have in my own life as it is. And so I wanted to have you speak to that.

Time is very relative in the sense that you can spend two hours and not achieve anything. So you say, okay, I've been working on this project for two hours. But then nothing happens. Your mind is not so clear. You're tired, you're not able to focus. You can't find the ideas because your mind is floating on the surface. We said the ocean and the waves, you're being jumping around on the surface. Maybe there are some issues you are worried about. Maybe there are stresses or something like that, or you're tired, and so you are just floating on the surface. And you can't get the intelligence which is already within you, but you're not able to access it. So resources are all within us, and sometimes we can access them, and we feel bright and clear and we find solutions and like that. And sometimes they are not there because they are veiled. They are covered. They are, you know, not available because of blocks and stuff, stresses and strains and like, that so in a simple way, what Transcendental meditation does is allows us to remove the blocks and the stresses and the strains and gives us greater clarity of vision so that we can focus better. So actually, even though itself, it doesn't require to focus during the practice, but it gives the ability to concentrate, it gives the ability to achieve more because of clarity of thinking, inner peace and inner quiet and inner stability. And we are not just being shaken by, you know, other things. So what TM does is removes deep rooted stresses even deeper than those that the good night's sleep removes. Things that have been lingering on for years because even we forgot them. And they are there in our subconscious, in our unconscious, and they are, you know, making us uneasy. We don't know why, but they are there. So what we have seen is this deep rest that is gained during Transcendental Meditation, which has a very interesting quality. It is what we call restful alertness. We are very alert and awake, yet we are very quiet and very peaceful. And this has been shown to dissolve stress and strain, improve health, improve balance of the physiology, even on a scientific level, better, you know, performance, reduced cortisol level, reduced inflammation, reduction in blood pressure, even longevity and rejuvenation, better performance at school, greater creativity. And so to go back to time, then suppose you can do within 10 minutes what you would have spent two or three hours to do. If you are very clear and effective and rested, then the time that you spend in meditation, 20 minutes, let's say, plus the 10 minutes you spend on your work, is half an hour instead of three hours. So you have gained actually in time when you invested in yourself, in your ability to do things. You know, people who are with you and entrepreneurs and investors and all that, they know this better than anyone in terms of if you have some bag of money and you hide it and keep it there and you're afraid to give it away for investment, then it stays limited. And with inflation, we know it disappears very quickly. Whereas if you invest it properly, which means you get rid of it in a sense, you take it away, you give it to some project or something, you invest it wisely, you're not losing it, you are actually investing it. So I would say that these 20 minutes are an amazing investment for great productivity, for dealing with the issues of life or being effective in any field, as parent or as son or daughter or, you know, aspect of life in business or whatever. We all want precision and we want our time to be used best. And that happens when we are best within ourselves.

Yeah, no that's great. That's great. So let's talk about consciousness then. And I don't know if I know anyone that has ever gone deeper in writing about consciousness that I've come across than you. So you really describe what consciousness is. And there's probably not just a simple answer, but one thing that I have said over the years is, you know, I just want to increase my level of consciousness. And what I mean by that is I just want to be a more connected human being, right? I want to feel that I have purpose and meaning and joy and not that I have to have any sort of purpose other than just being and for, you know, operating what I consider based on a value system integrity, having people in my life that I enjoy. And also when I have to work really hard or I have to do things that will endure suffering, I'm a guy that will exchange peace of mind for productivity, meaning I will suffer oftentimes in order to get done what I think is important. And I don't know if that's a very conscious thing. However, there are trade offs that I will do, especially the work I do in addiction recovery. So I spend about half my time, I genius recovery, my foundation, and I don't pay myself. I could take that same timing and contribute to a bunch of other things, but it helps me my own recovery. So it's not this philanthropic thing just because I'm a nice person. It's really beneficial and helpful to me. And I deal with some pretty heavy stuff and I deal with a lot of pain of other people. And so I think consciousness, that is a more conscious way for me to actually live my life. And so consciousness is an interesting word and I think it gets thrown around a lot. And I'd love for you to explain what it is. And I do want to say in your book, you talk about big C and small C consciousness. So I'd love for you to explain the difference of why it matters for understanding, you know, our experience as a human.

On the simplest level, consciousness is that which allows us to be aware, to be conscious. So now we're conscious. We're conscious of what we're saying, we're analyzing it, we're thinking about it, we're responding to it. If we were in anesthesia, we would not be conscious, of course, we would not be aware of anything. And so consciousness is really the most important aspect of our life that we usually take for granted. And we take for granted that we are conscious beings. And we don't even think and realize that without consciousness we don't exist. We are nothing. You know, we are just a mechanical object that, you know, doesn't have a sense of meaning, doesn't have a sense of experience of anything. So life goes on. And, you know, there are many facets of how we can really look at consciousness as a subjective experience, which means a very personal experience of what it is like to be myself, what it is like to be loving, what it is like to be having knowledge or joy or happiness. All of these experiences that we live on a subjective level are colors of consciousness. So when you say I'm in love means your consciousness, your awareness has taken the flavor, the color of love. When you say I'm feeling happy, that means your awareness is taken. A color, a flavor of happiness, which means fulfillment, which means well being, which means sense of security. All of these are subjective personal experiences, and they are actually colors and shades of awareness of consciousness. So how is it, you know, imagine without consciousness, there is not even pain, you know, and surgery, you can have under anesthesia surgery. And you don't, you don't mind, you don't care, you're not there, nothing happens. So you might be the wealthiest person in the world, or the most balanced person on the surface level, or the richest or the most knowledgeable. But if you're not conscious, if you don't have awareness, it doesn't mean anything. So that is personal consciousness, the ability to experience something. And different individuals have different broadness, different depths, different abilities, different widths of consciousness. So consciousness is not just an all or none phenomenon. It is something that changes. For example, in deep sleep, the body is conscious because if you poke the body or if there is a loud noise, it feels it and wakes you up. So that's why even deep sleep is a state of consciousness. In dreaming, you are there and you live, but you live a fantastic or, you know, fictitious kind of reality, but you believe in it during your dream. So this is a kind of consciousness. Also during waking, you can have different, different grades of consciousness. You can be drowsy, you can be dull, you can be alert, you can be calm, you can be feeling joy, you can feeling freshness and peace and feel great. You can have moments of ecstasy and epiphany and aha, experiences and feel like flying. So all of these are different, different layers and levels of consciousness. Even though you are the same person, you can go through all of these layers of consciousness. So the question is, where is this consciousness coming from? Is it the product of physical activity of the nervous system, as usually it has Been thought? Or is it something more fundamental? And so the research that has gone very deeply into trying to study where does this subjective experience come from, has led to many theories and paradigms, some of them saying that it all comes from the nervous system. But nobody is able to connect the physical, material, objective level with the subjective, personal experience of consciousness. How can you translate chemistry and electricity into that feeling of love, into that feeling of compassion, of knowledge, of hope, of even pain and joy and happiness and all of that? And there is absolutely no indication how this can happen and how we go from the physical to the consciousness level. So what I have taken in my research and in my study is to look at actually all the factors that could produce consciousness from a physical perspective. And I have found that it's a wall that you cannot cross. So I thought, why not look at it from the other way around? What if consciousness is primary? What if consciousness is a field and that field is infinite, unbounded, unlimited? And what if what we have as our individual consciousness is only the ability to experience some aspect of that field or another, depending on different situation and circumstances? And I found that this can answer all the questions actually, not only about the relationship between mind and body, consciousness and physiology, matter and non matter, but also about the meaning of life, about why we are here, about freedom and determinism, choice, how much choice we have at different levels, why there is suffering, what does it mean, what's the purpose of it all? And so it gave a full paradigm that answers very profound questions in life. And also a logic that explains how from a field, which is a field of consciousness, you can actually experience, experience the physical and material less aspects of life, that there are tables and planets and chairs and people, that they are physically there and they are real, they are not just an illusion, they are absolutely real. But what they are made of is something more subtle. And that field which they are made of is a field of consciousness. So the theory is not like my theory to start with. It's been there for thousands of years. And the ancient knowledge from yoga and Veda and Vedanta, it says that consciousness is primary. And there are many philosophers, you know, Plato, Leibniz, Spinoza, you know, many, many we can mention that are what we call idealists. And even some very top physicists today and in the past, quantum mechanics, you know, discoverers that have made the change in quantum mechanics, that have said that the universe is more like a thought than a physical thing creating a thought, but the thought is really primary. So what I did actually is Take this and show how it can appear as matter and what is its explanatory power? Which means how can it explain different phenomena in life? And does it contradict any finding? That is a robust finding in science, so it does not contradict. To the contrary, it's in tune with scientific findings. And plus, it has a very powerful explanatory power on all fields of actually that matter in our life. Happiness, well, being, meaning, you know, peace, harmony. All of these questions.

So everyone in the room here is an optimizer. So let's take a moment and imagine your perfect way of being in the world. Maybe for you, your perfect way of being is calm and in control. You're planning, you're organizing, you're in control of your day in your mind. Or maybe your perfect way of being is compassionate. You're caring, you're empathetic, you're listening. When you have a conversation with somebody, you want them to to feel like the only person in the room. Or maybe your perfect way of being is maximally productive. You are laser focused on what needs to get done. You do what's important and you do it in less time every day. So all these ways of being are amazing, but we're not all these ways every day. What if there was a technique that could help you get there each and every day? And there is. It's called meditation. So most people think that meditation is just kind of letting your mind go blank. It's not. Meditation is a practice or a training that leads to healthy and positive mind states. Sounds pretty good, right? Practice that leads to a healthy mind. There are lots of different forms of meditation. The most basic one is a focused attention on the breath and focused attention on the breath. You focus your attention on your breath, your mind wanders, which all our minds do. You notice it and you bring it back to your breath. So you focus on your breath, your mind wanders again. You notice it wanders and you return it to a neutral object. This very simple, simple thing has profound impact. So the first thing you notice when you start to do this exercise is that you can take your mind off of your thoughts, which are often negative or repetitive and stressful, and put them on a neutral object. This is huge. You can actually have control over your mind. Most people just sort of feel like every day your mind has stuff going through it and it's kind of thinking you. But with meditation, you learn that you can have control over the contents of your mind. You can get off the thought train. And once that happens, something really amazing happens. If you recognize that you have control over your mind and the contents of of it, you can also make decisions about what's in it. And you don't need to be defined by it. You realize that you are not your thoughts. And so all those stories that you may have about yourself and what you're capable of and what your limitations are on the world around you, those can go out the window. You can make the choice about what's inside your head. And then you realize the same thing can happen with your emotions. If you feel an emotion, it would in the past trigger an uncomfortable thought, which triggers more uncomfortable feelings. With a meditation practice, you realize that you can get off the emotional roller coaster. That rather than having a feeling and having it rule you, you can simply experience it as a sensation, let it rise and let it fall, and not give it the attention to control your life. So as an example, you are an employee and maybe you just made a big mistake at work. Your boss starts walking up to you and you feel your heart rate starting to raise and your breath is getting kind of shallow and you don't realize it and you're realizing you have all sorts of sensations of fear and shame and guilt. And this really sucks, these feelings. And so maybe you'll just blame your colleagues so you don't have to feel this stuff. Well, if you have a longer term meditation practice, you can begin to start to work with those feelings and as they start to rise and not be ruled by them, not be triggered by them, and then make a more appropriate choice in that scenario. Another place where meditation has fantastic impact is in your productivity. So you may not realize it, but every time your mind wanders off task, you're actually micro procrastinating. Each and every one of those little mind wanders is actually something that's sucking up time from your precious day. So one of the things that that I noticed when I started a meditation practice is I got incredibly efficient early on. I had a long format essay to do and I was the boss of a company. We sat in an open office, everything was distracting me because everybody's problem was my problem too. So I was writing this long format essay, which normally took me a few hours, and everything was distracting me. But once I started a meditation practice, those long format essays just became really efficient because each of those distractions I could say, nope, don't care. Back to the task at hand. You're a distraction. Don't care about you. Back to the task at hand. And I finished one of those things in 45 minutes. So all of these great benefits that we've discussed, improved productivity, better emotional responsiveness, they actually have corollary changes in your brain. Meditation makes real change in your brain. So let's dive into our brains to find out how. So let's start at the top. One of the first ways that meditation can change your brain is it affects your prefrontal cortex. Fantastic news. We have this area at the front of your head called your prefrontal cortex. It's our attentional control center. It helps us plan, it helps us process and organize. It's amazing. Bad news, as you age, your preface prefrontal cortex thins. Good news. If you are able to maintain a long term meditation practice, you may maintain the thickness of your prefrontal cortex as you age. In one study, a 50 year old long term meditator had the prefrontal cortex thickness of a 23 year old. Meditation can also help you down regulate your amygdala. So if you remember in that example with the employee when his physiology was flying all over the place, well, that was his amygdala in hyperdrive. Meditation helps you actually calm and down regulate your amygdala so you can calm and manage your body's emotional responses. Meditation also can increase the volume of your hippocampus. The side of your brain right there, right in the middle, your hippocampus is the area responsible for learning and memory. And who couldn't use more learning and memory in their life? Meditation also impacts your temporal parietal junction. Why does that matter? Well, your TPJ is an area responsible for compassion, empathy and perspective taking. And a meditation practice actually impacts that area of your brain. Meditation can also, and this is the coolest one to me, eight weeks of meditation can increase the density of your gray matter. Why is that meaningful? Well, Einstein had more gray matter than the average individual. Just saying. So if all of these things are so amazing, why don't more people meditate? We saw that only a portion of you do it. And the ones that do them, fantastic. But the ones that don't, why not? Or why do you start meditating and then you stop? Well, it turns out that meditation is actually hard to do. There's no one sitting inside the black box of your mind to tell you what you should be doing in there or to guide you and coach you. And we wanted to change that. So we set about a few years ago to create a tool called Muse that would actually give you real time feedback on your mind during meditation so you could know what was going on in There when you were focused and when your mind was wandering. As you heard, it's been used by millions of sessions, hundreds of companies and institutions. And then we stood back and we said, we want to really ramp this up. We want to build something new. And today, for the very first time on stage, I'm going to present to you. Muse 2. It's a beautiful, slim little device, slips on just like a pair of glasses. It has sensors that track your mind and your body during meditation to give you real time feedback to start, deepen, and enhance your practice. So those of you who know Muse one will know that Muse one had EEG sensors to track your brain during meditation. Muse two adds sensors that track your body, your breathing and your heart to give you real time feedback on your brain and body to guide you into a deeper practice. So Muse's body sensors track your body's movements to guide you into stillness and to help you find a pain free posture for meditating. For a lot of people, this is the first place to start. Muse2's breath sensing technology tracks each and every one of your breaths and guides you in breathing exercises to calm yourself or to energize yourself. Within this very same device, there's also a heart sensor that tracks the beating of your heart and gives you real time feedback on it. It's a beautiful experience. It's not simply a number on your wrist. You actually hear the sound of your heart translated every beat into the beat of a drum so that you can tap into your heart through rhythm and learn what helps you calm it. Our classic brain feedback, still in this device, actually lets you know what your brain is doing during meditation, gives you real time feedback so you hear when your mind is wandering and when you're focused. The metaphor we use is your mind is like the weather. So when you're thinking distracted, you hear it as stormy, and it guides your brain into calm. So not only is there real time feedback that actually guides you into an ability to harness and hone and calm your brain and your body, but there's also data, all this rich, beautiful data that's actually showing you what your brain and body is doing so that you can understand it, track it, and improve it. It's like having a little coach right inside this device. So meditation is amazing, but you need to actually build a daily practice. So we have a motivational architecture in there that helps you build a practice and even lets you schedule your meditations, because meditation really is amazing. It's one of the best things you can do in your life. But so few people actually do it. And in order to get this benefit, you need to actually do it each and every single day. It's like going to the gym. You go to the gym for a body. You go to the gym for your mind. And I asked Joe why does he meditate every day? What are the benefits that he experiences? He said that meditation helps me respond versus react. So you owe it to your mind and your body to teach it how to shift its responses so that you can live more productively, more compassionately, more happily, and so that you can make the choice of how you want to show up in the world every day when it comes to even some of.

Your, like, the athletes that you work with.

I'll show the Facebook Live crew the.

Beautiful audiences.

You talked a lot about.

Like, the yin and some of the mindset. And so how have you been able.

To get to people to be more consistent with their workouts and some of these things. As far as, like stopping drinking pot.

One, for the most part, it's probably.

Like in a emotional thing for them.

That'S stopping them from working out or emotional thing, a trigger that gets them.

To drink that pop.

I don't give much credence to that because if people don't control their food intake, then it's easier for them to make bad choices. So the emotional part somewhat, but I think a lot of it is solvable by managing your brain nutrition to a T. Right. For example, a lot of ADD is malnutrition. So you fix the kid's diet and suddenly you can concentrate, as are addiction. Yeah, yeah. And addictions and so on. So I think that if you. There's a lot of papers that have been published mainly out of Toronto and Boston, where they look at the composition of the breakfast and how it impacts cognition, but also food choices throughout the whole day. So it does really set you up as far as discipline. If you have a proper breakfast. I think that one of the best ways to solve America's health issues would be to have a federal breakfast program. Right. And then you don't have to feed your kids at home. You bring them in half an hour earlier, and they have the right nutrition. So if I was emperor of all the galaxies, I would standardize the breakfast because that would be a way to fight things like obesity. And, you know, kids don't pay attention in class. And any. Ask any school teacher, you can tell if kids eat breakfast and proper breakfast by the attention span in class. Okay. Because it sets you up for the.

Whole day, you say, and I love the way you describe it in the book is your brain is your deadliest weapon. So you talked about that early going to that. Yeah.

What makes, what makes us dangerous. You know, the human brain is responsible for, you know, creating things like the space shuttle and you know, these amazing, you know, technical tools that we have and also the nuclear weapons, you know, we are, that we're capable of doing that. We've had all these shootings happen lately. We've had all these acts of violence that have really rocked the world lately. And I understand the question. Everybody wants to get inside the criminal's head and they want to, they want to try to learn something because we want to tell ourselves this is never going to happen again. If we just understand where this guy came from, we're going to be able to prevent all these other things. We, we don't understand that the one thing we'll never be able to control is the intent to do harm. In that that is the ultimate concealed carry that everybody has. I tell people all the time, you know, you're driving down a road and you know, we're both driving on a, on a one way road and we're driving by all these cars and then one guy decides just to come over into my lane and hit me head on. He makes that choice and I'm shocked by it and I'm there. And then I realize if you really pull yourself back, oh my gosh. I have been relying on a social contract. I've been relying basically on a painted line for my protection. And I figured he's going to agree, just like I agree that we're going to continue to do this. Well, what happens when people use these acts of violence? It's those people that just decide to stop playing by the rules and exploit those rules against us. And we have to understand, you know, that the brain is our greatest weapon. Meaning, you know, as I said before, it's not about being bigger, faster and stronger. It's understanding how to use our brain as our protection. So this is your weapon, your first line of tools available to use your human body. And then anything like a firearm or a club or anything like, those are all ancillary things. But you first have to have your brain engaged correctly before you can do it. And that's what we try to do. I try to lay out in the book is how to correctly think about this and how to look at it, how to prepare your brain. And the idea behind it is once you've done this, it's kind of like having that fire Extinguisher. Extinguisher in the kitchen. You know, that most of us by code, have to have a fire extinguisher in our kitchen. Now does that mean because we have the fire extinguisher, we're going to be more likely to bring fire into our life? No, we've thought about the situation. We know how to operate the fire extinguisher and we're okay. Until there's a time where I'm absolutely have to use it. I don't need to think about it anymore. It's the same thing with violence. By understanding how the tool works, by understanding when the appropriate time versus inappropriate time would be to use those things and to really understand how it works, we then can go back to our great lives and understand that, you know, we can have this great life. But we recognize if any of these cues hit us, we know. Oh, okay, I have to be aware of this. Either to get myself out of there right away, which is the preferable thing, or if I've ignored the warning signs and I'm facing imminent grievous bodily harm, now I have to sit there and look at the human structure and know where to go and where to put my efforts to save myself.

And here's what's interesting. The subconscious mind, your survival brain, operates 400 millionths of a second before you're consciously able to do anything. It has already gone forward with its plan, right? So it's in action. And there's a part of the brain, the frontal lobe, which is our conscious mind, our logical, reasonable mind, called the ventral lateral prefrontal core cortex, which is supposed to be the impulse control, but it's already 400 millionths of a second behind. And if it's a logical thing and you can stop it, it's possible. But chances are, if it's a survival thing, it's not a chance. It can never stop it. And that's why I always say to people who are in addiction, this has nothing to do with your character, morals, willpower or strength. You can't stop your subconscious mind that survival based from protecting you, even though it's operating with an error message.

So how do you stop it?

I mean, what do you.

So what's the. There's got to be a way, like you were describing, of essentially what you were doing was rearranging the limbic to support what? The logic. If you call logic, the thing you want to do. Like if somebody wants to stop the behavior, the that, the. That man that manifests the addiction or whatever, you know, the impulse control that we're unable to muster with just the logic, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to stop drinking Mountain Dew or I'm going to stop drinking alcohol or whatever. It seems logical that that's. And what do I need to do? I just need to not drink or not eat, you know, McDonald's or not.

Whatever.

It sounds great when you're planning it in your head, but in the real world, then the limbic system doesn't. Whatever you. Whatever that says is it's doing its own thing, Right? Is that.

Absolutely. And it's not listening to that logic because it says if I have to rely on logic, I could be dead by the time I figure out whether it's logical.

Right.

So it is already engaged. So I'll give you an example. I worked with a professional baseball player. And so we're there, and he's hitting in the bat, not the batting cage. His coach is pitching to him behind a screen. And so the coach throws the pitch. He hits the ball straight back at his head, right at the screen, right? And the coach booms down in the dirt. And so I said to him, I said, did he choose to duck?

He didn't.

His mind, even though there was a cage in front of him, he can't possibly get hit by this baseball. Right. He cannot stop ducking. And he would duck every single time because his mind tells them there's a ball coming at your head. Logically, we shouldn't have any worry because the screens there. But that's gone out the window because it doesn't take any chances. And the other thing that we see, we do brain mapping. When somebody has post traumatic stress, for an example, the mind is looking at subconsciously old information from years ago and responding to it in real time. The brain map shows us that the occipital lobes, the O1, 201 and O2 area in the brain are lit up, which tells us it's looking at something. It's not looking at what's in front of them. It's looking at memory. So what we do, Dean, is we reset the memory. We take it at a high definition. It's stored in. When you have a traumatic memory, all your senses are. Are heightened. Sight, smell, hearing. So it goes into a high beta brainwave state and records it in high definition. And so what we do is reset it and bring it back into a lower resolution. And we can do that in like two minutes. We can reset it all.

That's so amazing. I recently heard, like, I have a perfect example of this that I recently heard some and I forget who it was, but they said basically, if you're going to tell yourself a lie, tell yourself a good lie. Right? Like, because you're lying to yourself anyway. Right. So an example was if you're repeating this constant belief that you have or something. So I'll give you the perfect example of it. Sometimes I'll wake up at like 4:30 in the morning and in the past, I would think, because that's an awkward time where you're like, okay, there's not that much more time till when I'm gonna wake up. And sometimes I couldn't get back to sleep, but I started. So that was my pattern. When I wake up at 4:30, I think, oh, it's get that awkward. I won't really get good sleep. But I started when I heard that, started telling myself a better lie. I started saying to myself, when I wake up at 4:30, I get excited about that because I'll go pee. And then I come back and have the best two and a half hours of sleep that I've had all night. And I started repeating that in my mind. And wouldn't you know it, that now I have the best two and it's data supported by my aura ring that I actually have the best, like sleep in that last two and a half hours of the day because I've told myself that that's what's gonna happen.

But it's. Because your subconscious mind is literal.

Yeah.

I always tell this when I work with an athlete, say a golfer. If you say in your mind, don't hit the ball in the water, it doesn't understand the negation.

Don't.

Yeah.

All it hears is hit the ball in the water. So when you tell your mind that your subconscious mind is literally taking that.

Yeah.

The logical part of the mind doesn't always use that, but the subconscious does every time.

Hey, that's my. That's funny. I'm a golfer too. And I would always. I might have great belief about my, my driving. I never miss the fairway. I can hit it as straight as I can point. Those are the words that I say to people and to myself. And it's true, you know, it's. I very rarely ever go off the fairway, you know, so interesting.

I love that talk with, with the professional golfers. This is a really interesting concept. When I work with them, the first thing I'll say to them is, do you think you need to be confident to play good golf? And they'll all say, yeah, and I'll say, no, you don't. You have skill. Right. Confidence is a byproduct of your skill. It's what happens after you execute your skill. If you put it in front of your skill, you'll chase confidence all over the golf course. But if you rely on your skill, you'll never have to worry. And these guys are so good at the professional level that they can hit any kind of shot in any kind of situation. Yeah, they're so highly skilled, they don't need confidence. Confidence will leave them all the time.

You once conducted a personal experiment by blocking your nasal breathing. So it's pretty funny you write about it, but we've also talked about that before. So how did this experience change things for you? So kind of briefly describe that and share with what, what you found out.

Well, once I learned of all the damage that mouth breathing can cause, and this was five, six years ago, did you know that the way in which your face will be developing is determined in large part by the way in which you are breathing when you're younger? So when you see kids with this very retrognathic, backwards growing face that is likely significantly influenced by the way in which they were breathing, usually their mouth breathers. This is so common that researchers have a name for it. They call it adenoid face. So if you have kids, especially if those kids are young right now, I would highly suggest converting them to be nasal breathers. Kids don't care about being healthy. Right. But they care about how they look. And so you can show them different pictures of what will happen to their faces if they don't shut their mouths. And that is, I've spoken at a lot of schools, and they do. They do not care about nitric oxide or more oxygen or any of that. But you show them pictures of how it's going to affect how attractive they are later on in their life, and they really pay attention. So knowing all of that, knowing from dentists and the science goes back, actually about 120 years, that the number one cause of cavities, according to many dentists, is not sugar. It is breathing through your mouth, which changes the ph in your mouth and makes it for a breeding ground for cavities, another periodontal disease. So knowing this, I thought it would be interesting to do a study in which we took 100 people and made them mouth breathers for 10 days and then converted them to nasal breathers and did data dumps the whole time, blood work, you name it across the board, pulmonary flu tests, And I presented this to a researcher at Stanford, the head of rhinology research there. I said, we should do a big study like this needs to happen. You're at Stanford. You have the means to do this. And he didn't have the means to do it. There was no funding for studies like this. So he allowed me to do an experiment with two people that was the maximum amount. 10 days mouth breathing, then 10 days nasal breathing and comparing data sets across the board. And we knew it wasn't going to be fun. We didn't know it was going to be this miserable. And I was absolutely astounded to see the difference that happens to your body, particularly sleep quality, snoring and sleep apnea. To think that there are so many millions of people out there who don't know why they're snoring, who don't know why they have sleep apnea, who are struggling to breathe every night and not realizing that some of that at least, is tied to the pathway through which you inhale and exhale.

So what was the most miserable part about it? Like, day 10, what was going on?

The whole thing was awful. What you realize is that so much of your energy is lost, you constantly feel spent, and your ability to focus is significantly decreased as well. And there's science to show this. Just breathing through your mouth inhibits your ability to remember things, to make proper decisions, to control your emotions and your attitude. Just breathing through your mouth. And it's one thing to read those studies. It's another thing to experience this in full force all day long. And it may be sad because you think about the number of kids who have chronic obstruction, number of adults during allergy season who are just going through their days breathing in and out of their mouths because their noses are so plugged, they have headaches, they can't focus, they have sleep problems. No one's talking about anything tied to nasal breathing. So they do all this other stuff. None of that other stuff helps. And so much of it is tied to that basic biological need to breathe in and out of your nose.

Yeah.

Yeah. I had someone in recovery make a comment that had a different meaning to me when this person was talking about breathing, saying that a lot of recovery just happens between here and here. And I'm like, what do you mean? It's your breathing. And so if you watch someone that is depressed or stressed out or lonely, they usually have very short breath, they're very crunched over. There's usually a lot of physical pain attached to it. And so it's interesting. So you know, I'll get in stressed moments and one of the first things that Cherie will say to me is like, just breathe. You know, she'll put her hand on my back and say, you know, breathe. Just as a reminder. Because when you're in stress moments, you've, it's like shortened breathing. And yeah, so there is a lot of things that can be solved with what we're talking about here.

So on that same note, so if panic and anxiety and stress are exacerbated by the short chest breathing, you can reverse those patterns by learning how to breathe the way that I just showed you. Slowly, deeply, in and out through the nose. And from the psychologists and psychiatrists that I've talked to, they have said this is the number one most effective thing for anxiety, especially acute anxiety or panic. You're really stressed out some, you know, one of your co workers really made you angry, someone cut you off in traffic. Whatever it is, that's an opportunity to take control of your breathing. And this isn't new age wishy washy stuff. This has been scientifically documented for decades. Over and over, when your breathing changes, it's going to affect your ability to regulate your emotions, your ability to think and more. So a trick that they showed me was that when you feel this stress come up, you can do that three compartment breath that I just showed you. You don't have to stand up to do that. You take these slow breaths, just sitting down into the belly, into the chest, into the neck, and you let it out. And you do that again in the belly, loose belly, chest, neck, and you let it out and you do that about three to five times. And when you come back to breathing, you can breathe in a very slow and nourishing pattern. About five to six seconds in, five to six seconds out. It's called coherent breathing. There are several studies showing how effective this is for lowering blood pressure, lowering heart rate, allowing more oxygen to get up into your brain and more. So three compartment breathing followed by that. Coherent breathing is a secret device that you can use anywhere. No one will even notice that you are doing it. And I think you can really see the difference if you don't believe yourself, if you don't believe me, look at your own blood pressure, look at your heart rate variability, look at your stress levels after doing this. And this is a good thing to use throughout the day. You don't have to just wait until you're really stressed. You can prevent stress by adopting healthier breathing habits.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. Awesome.

Awesome.

Is there any other best breathing techniques or anything that you think would be useful to mention? Because you write about quite a bit.

In the book, I think for anxiety, for very strong anxiety. A trick I Learned from Patrick McKeown, who's been studying this stuff for 25 years, is a lot of people would say in the past, get a paper bag and breathe in and out of a paper bag. That can work for anxiety. But sometimes people are having heart attacks and people have given them paper bags, then it's really bad news. So people don't say to do that anymore. What you should be doing is, is taking your hands, placing them over your face, and you breathe in to a count of about three, and you breathe out to a count of about three, keeping all your fingers very closed. In for three, out for three. Make that breath smaller. In for three, out for 3. Make it even smaller. In for three, out for three. One more time. The smallest breath. In for three, out for Three. You can place your hands on your side, and when you go back to breathing, continue breathing these very. Excuse me, very small, short breaths. You do that for about 10 to 20 seconds. And if you're still stressed out, you can place your hands back over your face. And that tends to work really well for panic and acute anxiety attacks.

Okay.

I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here.

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