How Your Biology UNLOCKS Trading Success | Trading Psychology

Hello and welcome to lesson 12, the final lesson of the advanced psychology course for high performance trading. And this video is looking at the biology of decision making. This will be perhaps the most surprising and disruptive lesson in the whole course. We naturally tend to think of thinking as purely a cognitive task. Thoughts, as it were, are essentially parts of our imagination. So something quite ethereal. But thinking and trading decisions take place in our brains. And our brains are made of biological stuff. And research has shown that the chemistry within our brains and bodies has a direct cause and effect on the quality of our thought processes and decision making. When system one takes control before you're aware of it, it's because of ultra fast, preconscious biological mechanisms. Our bodies act first and then we think. And so the decisions we depend on our biology. So the point of this lesson is to explain what those biological mechanisms are behind your thinking and show you how changes within your body will either improve or harm your trading results. And we need to start by going back to lesson two briefly to understand our behavior in the natural world and the environment that our brains developed in to appreciate exactly why all of this has such profound meaning in your trading when faced with a real physical threat or a much needed opportunity. So perhaps a predator or a potential food source, your amygdala recognizes that as a pattern, a shape or a collection of stimuli that it has learned could mean threat or opportunity. And sometimes it's a fine mind. It could be both. As depicted here in this picture, A woolly mammoth and a saber toothed tiger are both threat and opportunity, depending on how you assess your state of readiness, your fight and ability and other available resources, such as fellow hunters or traps. And markets are the same in this regards. Every price move is a potential threat and a potential opportunity, depending on how we interpret it and interact with it. Now, the amygdala, recognizing these patterns is an inherited mechanism. It obviously learns from its own new experiences, but it also has memory passed to it genetically. Monkeys raised in the zoo still freak out the very first time they see the shape of a snake, for instance. Children have been shown to react more strongly to shapes like snakes and spiders the very first time they are exposed to them. It's massively advantageous from a survival point of view that we can pass down threat and opportunity patterns to our offspring without having to expose and train them from scratch every time we're all born ready, as it were. But the amygdala is not intended to be active all the time. It evolved to run quietly in the background until it Perceived a threat or opportunity match, at which point it triggers the hypothalamus to mobilize a vast array of bodily reactions. It signals the body to halt digestion, draw energy towards your immune system ready to fight a potential infection from an injury. Become more focused, divert blood flow and oxygen to the muscles and basically get ready to fight or run away. The fight or flight. And all of those functions are short term strategies designed to help you cope with the immediate threat or take advantage of the immediate opportunity. And that mechanism in its entirety is called the sympathetic nervous system. It's a dedicated network that can directly communicate with every major organ in the body. After the identification of of a potential threat or an opportunity. All connected by an incredibly fast acting and short run nerve system driven by adrenaline. The whole network bypasses your conscious awareness. You only consciously notice it's come online when you feel the bodily effects. Like muscles tensing up and feeling more alert. And below the surface, your veins constrict, your blood pressure goes up, your, your heart rate increases to drive more oxygen to your muscles. In other words, it tries to warm up the machine ready for action. At the same time, other functions that aren't critical to your survival in the short term are shut down. And then in your lungs, it tells your bronchial tubes to dilate and it may even speed up your breathing rate to further oxygenate your blood in preparation. And of course, because under threat or inside of an opportunity, you, you need as much light coming into your eyes as possible. It dilates your pupils to supercharge your eyesight. Digesting food consumes a lot of bodily resources and energy. So your whole digestive system, from saligo production right down to your large intestine, is put into a kind of dormant state, allowing resources to be directed elsewhere. And glycogen stored in your liver and your muscles is converted to glucose and ready to feel your body as it springs into action. You're already familiar with a lot of this because you've experienced the symptoms yourself. You know what butterflies in your stomach feels like, or having a dry mouth. Your sympathetic system is your get ready to fight system, as it were. It's your accelerator. You see an opportunity or a threat, a trend develop in the markets or perhaps a trade turns against you and then your sympathetic system will kick in. And that's not a bad thing. In fact, it's essential. System 1. Your experience and your intuition is not located only in your brain. After all, what is a gut feeling or an instinct? Trading is fundamentally a whole body activity. And the Sympathetic nervous system is the mechanism that identifies and reacts to threats and opportunities in the market. And learns from all the previous trade outcomes. But what happens when the threat or opportunity has passed? Well, your body has another parallel system that does exactly the opposite. It's called the parasympathetic system. Which also has its own dedicated circuitry to your vital organs. But this network is less direct, so the signals take longer. Let me just put the sympathetic system back up again for comparison. You can see that each organ is much more directly connected. With shorter, more direct circuitry. But here in the parasympathetic system, the circuitry has been economized. This system has a lower priority, and it takes a lot longer to kick in. For good reason, because it is better to prioritize fight and flight. Rather than the system that helps you sit around chilling out and munching on bananas. When this system comes online, it slows your body down and your muscles relax. You become less focused. Your blood pressure drops, your heart rate slows, and your breathing is calmer. And once it's done all that and it's sure that you are safe and that you've got time on your hands, it will gradually start all of your repair and maintenance routines. Your eyes and other senses are deprioritized. And the body then sets to work on digesting food. And any spare glycogen and fat gets stored away in case it's needed the next time you encounter a threat or an opportunity. And importantly for trading, it's only in this state that unconscious deep learning and complex pattern sorting takes place. And I'll come back to this later. This is your much needed decelerator, otherwise known as the rest and digest system. These opposing systems develop to cope with occasional appearances of threats and opportunities. Followed by longer periods of repair, maintenance, preparation, and building of reserves. The sympathetic system, your accelerator and fight or fight response, Is not designed to be permanently engaged. Now, it can stay engaged for long stretches. But it comes at the expense of your repair functions. And eventually your immune system will run out of gas, as it were. And again, more importantly for trading, if your sympathetic system is on all the time, it's harder for learning to take place. Instead, it sees everything as an oversimplified threat or an opportunity. This is one of the major drawbacks of being human. We have the unique ability to imagine and think that all kinds of potential future threats and opportunities. So it's much harder for us to relax and let the parasympathetic system do its work. In all other mammals, these Two systems tend to work far more dynamically. An antelope spots a threat, its sympathetic system is mobilized. Cortisol, the fear hormone, is released, and they take extreme defensive action. Their whole body is directed towards a single purpose, surviving. But if you've ever watched any of this on a natural history program, you'll know how quickly these animals return to a relatively chilled act state. Grazing, engaged in social behavior, yawning, even sleeping. As soon as that immediate threat has subsided. In other words, they accelerate and decelerate very quickly. And the same goes for predators. When they are faced with an opportunity, their sympathetic system is engaged and their system is flooded with testosterone, the confidence and risk taking hormone. And they suddenly feel all of the superpowers and optimism that comes with that. But again, once the opportunity has been taken. So either they made the kill or they got away, their parasympathetic system kicks in very quickly and they go into rest and digest mode. And this is how these two biological systems are supposed to work. Relatively long periods of rest and digest in parasympathetic mode, followed by short, singular periods of fight or flight response. Both of these animals are fully in sympathetic fight or flight mode. The difference is the type of hormone that is driving their particular behavior. The lion is experiencing a rush of testosterone, so a euphoric rush of confidence that it can succeed. And the zebra is being flooded with cortisol, the hormone that induces fear and the possibility that it might not succeed if it doesn't do something extreme. Both animals have a highly elevated sense of risk taking, which is being driven by these two very powerful hormones. Okay, now here's the problem when it comes to trading, and it's potentially a massive one. The market just keeps coming at you. It never stops. Your amygdala isn't stupid, far from it. It's 100% aware that even when you're not at your desk or even when you're asleep, potential threats and opportunities are coming in thick and fast, 24 hours a day, relentlessly. And unless you have a comprehensive plan for mitigating or coping with this fact, it can mean that you have elevated levels of cortisol and testosterone in your system all day, every day. And apart from the obvious effects on your health that come from not spending enough time in Paris and pathetic mode, the most salient point is that system two is not available. You can totally understand why. Historically, institutional traders famously burn out if they stay in the game too long. They've been engaged in a never ending atmosphere of threat and opportunity, constantly being flooded with cortisol when the market is going against them and flooded with testosterone when things are going their way. But they do have an unusual advantage over retail traders. And I'm not talking about inside information or better technology. Institutional traders don't actually need to be good traders and in fact most aren't. Most are completely controlled by System 1. And within banks they actually have the nickname monkeys, the speculative floor traders. The monkeys are overseen by an entire department of risk managers. And these risk managers effectively take on the role of system two. That is their job. Retail traders don't have that luxury of an emotionally detached or biologically balanced person watching over them. Nobody is going to come and tap you on the shoulder and say I think you're being overconfident or over cautious, too risky or too risk averse or maybe even look, I think you need a holiday or let's just lower your account size and work yourself back up. As a retail trader you are on your own and it's a phenomenally difficult job. Banks are successful because they assign different specialist roles to different people. So floor traders can act recklessly like chimps, and they mostly do. The bank actually incentivizes them to gamble. That is their function. But the bank also employ specialist risk managers, doctors, psychologists and even psychiatrists who all take on the function of system 2. The bank as an institution is successful because across all departments they have the balance. Not most of the time anyway, if we've got their checks and balances correct. Not always. But as a retail trader you need to do everything by yourself. You need to find that balance within you, which is why you must understand the biology of your decision making. So far this course has mainly dealt with decisions on a trade by trade basis. But now I want to extend to the general health and consistency of system one so it's able to trade effectively in the longer term. And to do that we need to zero in on the confidence and the fear hormones, testosterone and and cortisol, which both govern risk taking behavior but in different ways. So first of all, testosterone in high doses, this drives you forward with euphoric optimism and self belief, usually as a result of recent successes. And it gives you a heightened appetite for risk. All of which grits traders during bull markets and is a phenomenon known in biology as the winner effect. Biologists have noticed that when an animal wins a fight for territory or a mate, it's more likely to win the next fight as well, because it goes in with a heightened confidence and willingness to take even more risks. And this is exactly how Financial bubbles start from a biological point of view at least. Success breeds confidence and high levels of testosterone, which result in higher risk appetites. People take bigger and bigger positions, and of course, because everyone is suffering the same effect, the price just keeps going up. Success results in more testosterone, which results in more risk and more success and more testosterone. So in simple terms, price and bubbles are fundamentally testosterone. Field feedback loops, system 2, oversight, reason, logic, common sense, have all been discarded and it can't last forever. At some point, somebody with a clearer head and a large stake will decide that it is a biologically driven bubble. Or they'll get spooked by something. They'll realize the price is not real and they'll pull out as soon as the price begins to reverse. There will be a short delay while everyone refuses to accept that it's collapsing. But pretty quickly, everyone's amygdala will recognize that the opportunity has turned into a thumb threat. And instantaneously, testosterone is turned off and cortisol is injected into the system, inducing panic selling and a massive price drop. Traders will feel a terrifying loss of control of their surroundings, fear the worst, and extreme and irrational behavior soon follows. And cortisol also has the potential to go into a brain body feedback loop. And this is what explains why all irrational bubbles, from the Dutch tulip bubble of 1637, all the way up to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2010. In all examples, trading behavior was almost entirely Devoid of System 2 Analysis and Oversight on the way up and on the way down. But for you as a retail trader, just be aware that you can experience this process, from trade to trade, or even within a single trait. And what you should know about cortisol specifically is it stays in the bloodstream for a very long time. It's one of the most persistent of any of the hormones, particularly in humans. Unlike other animals, who can rapidly decelerate back into a relaxed state. No longer anxious about what just happened or what might happen tomorrow, we have the unique ability, some might say it's a curse, to be able to imagine and worry about the future and relive the past. Meaning that even when our immediate environment is safe, we create stress for ourselves with our own thoughts. And that can keep cortisol in our system for way longer than it should be. But in both cases, testosterone and cortisol, if you have too much of Ivor in your system, they will progressively shut down system two entirely without you realizing it. You would still think you were being rational. No one acting irrationally at the height of a bubble thinks they are the exact opposite. They all think they are masters of the universe. Now, I'm not trying to demonize these hormones and say that they are bad. You fundamentally cannot trade without them. If you managed to inhibit your dream or gland from producing any testosterone or cortisol, which are shown here in the upper part of your kidneys, you'd simply not be sensitive to any opportunity or threat in the market whatsoever. You need beta hormones to assess complex risks, take risks, manage risks, and to assess and take complex opportunities. It's just that in high doses, both hormones can go into feedback loops and can have massively adverse effects on your trading behavior. What you're looking at here is the biological headquarters of your trading behavior. And very quickly, if you're wondering about the differences between men and women when trading in terms of this mechanism, there really isn't a difference. Obviously, women on average have lower levels of testosterone in general, but when it comes to fight or flight responses, the mechanism is the same for all of us. And our adrenal glands have the ability to spike high doses in men and women. And the feedback loops are the same. All traders run the risk of overdosing on testosterone or cortisone. And for all of us, there is an optimum level. Like so many things in biology, neurology and psychology, they function on an inverse U curve, simply meaning as the quantity rises, you get more and more of the benefit. But it will peak at some point and then have the opposite effect. At mere optimum levels. The effects of testosterone and cortisol are positive, thrilling even, as they both release dopamine to keep you stimulated and engaged. It's why you enjoy watching the car chase or fights and heroic behavior in films and riding roller coasters. You are riding the sympathetic optimum as much as possible and getting the dopamine hit that comes with that. At the right levels, it can be an extremely positive feeling. At very low levels, when deep in the parasympathetic mode, you're not willing to take risks, nor do you even have an appetite for it. You're not sensitive to to threat, and you're pretty lax about protecting your tent. You're too chilled out to care about anything, but at too high levels, you run the risk of going into unconscious and irrational risk taking or an oversensitive sense of being under threat paranoia. So being 100% chilled out all the time is not the goal. A nervous feeling in your stomach or a sense of excitement at an opportunity. That doesn't mean that you're in the wrong state of mind. These are necessary and normal feelings to trade when they are in balance. Optimal performance in trading depends on the optimal state of health of your sympathetic nervous system and the balance it has with the parasympathetic system. At the start of any trading activity, your goal is to be in the optimum physical and mental state. This is at the root of trading consistency. And trading consistency is fundamentally a biological process. It's about making decisions with threats and opportunities. And exactly how you perceive threats and opportunities is governed by your adrenal glands at the top of your kidneys. And by the way, when you are in sympathetic mode, normally that would mean you are doing something intensely physical. But in trading, you're sat at your desk with all those hormones racing around your body and no natural mechanism for them to flush it out. That is something you need to be aware of. You don't need to be a fitness fanatic, but you absolutely need a very basic level of cardiovascular fitness to trade. Well, in lesson 10, I talked about splitting your training preparation into three parts, with that first section being some form of physical activity to elevate your heart rate. Cardio exercise is a stressor. It activates all of the components of your sympathetic system. But when it stops, it triggers your parasympathetic system to reset everything. If you are someone who exercises, you know that afterwards you feel relaxed, more at peace, maybe hungry. That is your body going into rest and digest mode. Cortisol and testosterone levels are reduced. You may have noticed the same effect after sudden hot or cold exposure. Like saunas or cold showers. As soon as the shock subsides, you go into the equal and opposite parasympathetic mode. And it's a very nice feeling doing this before your trading session resets you. And as you move on to the technical preparation phase and you begin anticipating potential threats and opportunities, your sympathetic system then starts to power up again, but now from a much lower baseline. And then the mental prep phase is the final check to ensure that you are going into the session with the proper system. 2. Oversight. That three stage process within your pre trade preparation will help ensure the greatest likelihood that you are going into trade in in an optimal state. It's the opposite of perhaps coming home from a stressful day at work, or having an argument with your partner, or even seeing some fearful news and then jumping straight into the markets, which is what a lot of traders unfortunately do. Remember, your aim is to trade with consistency and for that you need a baseline measurement. If every time you sit down to Trade, you are in a completely different mental state or your baseline is moving. Your assessment and perception of risk and opportunity cannot be consistent. Therefore your trading decisions will not be consistent. Consistent. I trade in the mornings and this is what my personal routine looks like. I start with a cold shower straight after I wake up and I can assure you that shocks my body into sympathetic mode. I then do some high intensity body weight training, so some short sprints on an exercise bike to rapidly accelerate my heart rate, press ups, sit ups, that sort of thing, and then some stretching to warm down. Then I have a warm shower and I get ready for the day. So I make a cup of tea and I'll go out into the garden just for some fresh air and some sunlight. And now in a much more relaxed state. I then go to my office and start my technical prep. And my technical prep always follows the same sequence of turn on my computer, opening my platform, checking all of the settings on the various indicators and tools that I use, making sure my charts are on the right time frame and showing the right instruments, etc. And then I check the news calendar to identify what I will or won't be trading for that day. And after that, my mental preparation includes some visualization techniques and relaxation breathing. And by the way, I don't check my phone, emails, social media or regular news until after my trading session has ended. I don't want any distractions. Everything I do is in the exact same order every single day, with the emphasis being on preparing for trading. The rest of normal life comes after. And what that does is ensures that I am in exactly the same mental state every time I trade. It's a reliable baseline and I am consistent before I even consider my first trade of the day. And having that consistent baseline means my perception and response to threats and opportunities is pretty much always the same. That is the key to my ability to trade consistently. Something else I should mention here is the role of your dut in trading. Your digestive system contains well over 100 million neurons, about the same as a cat's brain. And scientists refer to this as our second brain in parasympathetic mode. Rest and digest. The system is dedicated to its main role of breaking down and processing food, as you would expect. But in sympathetic mode, as we are when we're trading, it pauses digestion and it diverts all its resources to contribute to our threat and opportunity responses. And it has a critical role to play in sympathetic decision making. Some new disorders are actually being successfully treated now simply by altering the microbiome and Digestive health of the gut. People literally think differently when their gut health improves. This is an enormous topic by itself, it's too complex for this video. But the quick takeaway here is the importance of gut health and diet in decision making. We are what we eat, our food becomes the stuff we're made of. And the stuff that we are made of affects how we think and make decisions. So pay attention to what you consume. The gut feelings we all have and we trust are the very real and scientifically backed effects of our digestive system's dual role as it prioritizes between sympathetic and parasympathetic mode. Intuition is another biological mechanism stemming from your gut's vital contribution to responding to threats and opportunities. And to do that reliably so we can actually trust our own interest in gut instincts. Like the rest of our body, it needs to be in balance. The biological term for this balance is called homeostasis. And in very simplified terms, homeostasis describes the interplay between bees, opposing forces. You are never equally balanced as it is shown here. Your body is constantly tipping between one state and the other. And that's how it should be. So periods of heightened activity followed by periods of rest and relaxation. And herein lays the problem. If there were one overarching maladaptive system that is potentially incompatible with trading, it is this. The markets just keep coming at you. Your amyndeler is quite capable of determining what is a short or medium term threat or opportunity, but it has got no way of determining between medium and long periods. So it will assume all threats or opportunities are relatively short and do have an end on the horizon. And given that it is quite willing to keep the sympathetic nervous system very, very elevated until the threat or opportunity goes away. But in trading it doesn't go away, it just keeps rolling. Meaning the sympathetic system is much more likely to stay elevated. And I mentioned earlier that cortisol, the fear hormone, is particularly long lasting. So there is a natural bias towards keeping your sympathetic system going in a pessimistic way. To be a good trader over the long term and trade consistently and maintain system to oversight, you must take steps to find a level of overall physical homeostasis that the markets are fundamentally working against. So what does that mean in practice? Well, this is possibly the greatest paradox in trading, particularly for retail traders who are managing the risk by themselves. Put in the cart before the horse as we say here in the uk. If I asked you why you were trading, you might say, to make money. And if I ask why do you want to make money, then it's highly likely you would explain that you wanted more money to better your life, escape debt, have financial freedom, have less money worries, generally provide for the security of your family, plan for a relaxing retirement and so on to be able to enjoy life and do the many things you currently can't afford to do. All of which really means you want to spend more time in the future in parasympathetic mode, being relaxed and less time in this stressful fight or flight mode. And it's a perfectly valid goal we all want. But how do you achieve that? Well, if you're going to do that with trading, assuming you have a realistic strategy, really positive probabilistic expectancy, then of course you need to trade consistently. So let your winners run, cut your losers quickly, think probabilistically and give your system time for its edge to balance out and everything else on that list that we've been talking about in this course. The paradox is that many traders have made a secret pact with themselves that once they master trading, once they've made their millions, they will then prioritize other parts of their life. So they will sacrifice or delay exercising, finding contentment and taking care of their physical and mental well being, social life, spending time with family until such time as they've got a grip of their trading behavior. In other words, they've assumed that if they do everything on the right here, they will get all of this on the left somewhere down the line. And if that's you, unfortunately that just isn't going to work. You're expecting the cart to drive the horse to make good trading decisions against that constant barrage of threats and opportunities. In sympathetic mode, you have to be able to decelerate and switch back to parasympathetic mode after each trade or trading session. It is not possible to make rational system 2 type decisions when you are in a constant elevated sympathetic mode. Balance can't be delayed until after you become a successful trader, because successful trading depends on it in the first place. Trading consistency is fundamentally biological, not just psychological or mental, or something that your trading system alone can deliver. So to measure and handle risk well, you must find as great a level of homeostasis as possible. This graph represents what a healthy oscillation between the two systems should look like. This is natural. Essentially, short periods of exposure to stress, challenges, threat and opportunity, followed by regular and longer periods of deep recovery, rest and digest, and deep learning. So it's not about becoming a monk and maintaining a zen like state 24 hours a day. You should be getting Stuck in tackling the challenges of the market and increasing your tolerance for discomfort through frequent exposure to it, but then stepping back and knowing how to properly rest, recover and learn. This graph, on the other hand, is unnatural and represents how most newer traders are. Unfortunately and in this state it is almost impossible to improve, learn or develop trading skills because this is a reactionary state. System two is almost completely offline and system one is operating from survival mode, which you now know is totally maladaptive for trading. Sadly, the modern world puts us in this state. Advertisers, filmmakers, social media platforms and news media outlets especially are all built from the ground up to keep us in sympathetic mode. Add to that the stresses of mortgage payments, regular bills, increasing costs of living, rising levels of poor health, deadlines and schedules at work, even the pressure of the daily to meet. We are under a constant barrage of stimulus that keeps us in fight or flight mode. If you want to know why there's a mental health crisis and why opinions are more and more extreme and polarized, you're looking at it. We are operating merely all day, every day from system one now, ignoring the wider social ramifications. This, from a purely trading perspective, it will not work. You cannot trade rationally and effectively if this is how you're functioning. And the problem is, many of us don't realize we are. You might have heard of the parable of the slow, buoyant frog. The story goes, if you put a frog in cold water and very slowly raise the temperature, it will not react or notice that it's slowly cooking and it will not jump out and will die. Now it's debatable if this is true or just a parable, but for us it's a worthy lesson. Either way, we are designed to notice sudden changes in our environment. When things change for the worse, more slowly over longer periods of time, we don't always recognize it and we don't take action. Hardship and stress just become normal for many of us. We don't know anything else. So it's very possible that the stresses of modern life have slowly increased over many years or even decades without you really noticing. And now being stressed is what you're used to. It's just accepted as normal. But it isn't. Well, it may be normal now, but it isn't natural and you will have to address it if you want to trade successfully. Your job now should be to ask yourself if you are perhaps in this situation with your life. It is a difficult, self reflective exercise, but you need to ask yourself seriously about the balance or the lack thereof in your life? Are you out of balance from a more natural level of homeostasis? Are you operating with a background level of elevated sympathetic mode? Or are you, are you put in the cart before the horse? Have you chosen to deprioritize your mental and physical well being until such time as you've master trading? It shouldn't come as a surprise to you now as to why successful famous traders always have a heavy interest in health, diet, philosophy, even spiritual practices. If you've ever read their autobiographies, you'll find them spending a lot of time talking about looking after themselves and and keeping this important ounce. They are extremely philosophical people. They deliberately work at it and make it a priority. Because this kind of oscillation is hard to achieve, we usually get thrust into sympathetic mode. But it is much harder to decelerate and go back into a sustained period of parasympathetic mode. Now, you know this because if you've been hard at work for months and then you go on holiday for the first few days, you're sitting on the beach with a cocktail and you're still in full sympathetic mode. Your brain is still racing, you are physically restless and it just feels strange. You are not relaxed. It takes a few days to make that transition, if you manage that transition at all. But you can actually deliberately trigger your parasympathetic system. So a manual override if you like. If you think about yawning, and I mean really think about it, think about the last time that you did yawn, then maybe you might be tempted to yawn. Now, if you watch someone else yawn, you might yawn too. Yawn now if you want. Nobody's watching. But yawn is a physiological trigger of the parasympathetic system. A sigh is a similar mechanism. A sigh is basically the threat or opportunity is over. And whether it's from relief or disappointment, the body needs to switch to parasympathetic mode. So you sigh. Yawning and sighing are methods of adjusting your rate of breathing. And breathing exercises are by far the most powerful mechanism by which people can manually and deliberately trigger their own parasympathetic system. In the short term and with training, you can completely take control of it. Now that is another full lesson in itself. So I won't be able to cover it here in detail, but you can do some simple research and you'll find several methods for yourself. And if you do them repeatedly through the day, you will be surprised how it brings your heart rate down, lowers your blood pressure and dips you into the parasympathetic mode very easily and it's a really easy habit to develop. And the same thing goes for stretching, visualization, meditation, attention control exercises. They're a big one. Heat and cold stress, such as cold showers and saunas, very short bursts of high heart rate activity and simply eating healthily. They're all also very powerful parasympathetic triggers. Again, topics by themselves that require full lessons, but please do some research on the many simple techniques that you can utilize now. I don't know if you thought that's where lesson 12 would lead you. If I told you at the start of this course that the secret to trading was about managing homeostasis, work, life balance, stress management, relaxation strategies and overall prioritization of health and well being over trading, I'm sure you'd have Larkney out of 10. And of course you'd be right. This is not the secret to trading, but it is the critical cherry on the cake. It becomes the most important aspect when combined with all the knowledge, skill and self awareness that you've acquired over the previous 11 lessons. But of course the journey is not over by any stretch. Updating your trading mindset and modifying your own behaviors becoming more self aware does not come easy to humans. It is much easier to find external reasons for your lack of performance than to examine yourself. But the fact that you've sat through 12 lessons of this course means by definition you are taking responsibility for your trading decisions. And that is an extraordinary achievement. You cannot underplay that. Before this course it's possible, probable even, that you didn't know what you didn't know. You probably didn't appreciate just how much your decision making could be and was hijacked by completely unconscious processes. An Amazonian tribesman living cut off from the world doesn't know he can't drive. It's a skill he doesn't have, nor does he know he doesn't have it. And this is where the vast majority of unprofitable traders are at. They don't have any awareness or oversight over system one, nor do they know that they don't have it, or know that they need to have it for that matter. But by now you do know. I'm sure it's dawned on you just how often your trading decisions were on autopilot without any oversight or check in of the original urge, push or emotion. And you now understand what's going on behind the scenes. There is a risk that you can become overwhelmed at the realization of the amount of work required to become a successful trader. It might be frighteningly clear to you now why only 1 or 2% of people actually succeed as traders. You may be aware of the many maladaptive mechanisms at play now, but having that knowledge hasn't meant the problems have just vanished. Without consistent long term practice and retraining, System 1 will still have the ability to assume total control over your mind and body. For me, this is the slide that really sums it all up. And I showed you this back in lesson two on decision evaluation. System one, the chint, with its powerful sub selves and priorities is pulling and pushing you around in much greater proportion to your level of awareness and System two, oversight. This is the reason why we say that trading is simple but not easy. It's simple because the trading strategy that you should be using is simple and you just grind it out over time. But it's hard because System one doesn't understand long term strategies and probabilities. And it sees each trade or short periods of trading as win or lose battles, which leads to overcomplication, layering, fiddling, taking profit early, or doubling down on losers to recover what it thinks the market has stolen from it or try and engage in revenge type behavior as if the markets could be taught a lesson or even neutralized as if it were a predator. Trading is a skill and like all skills, it can be taught, learned, replicated and mastered. If another human being can trade successfully, so can you. But you must appreciate that it takes time, effort and perseverance. This course is a starting point for you and I hope you'll agree it's given you a very solid foundation. But I am not claiming this is going to make you a success overnight. In fact, I know it won't. That's why I don't sell courses. This is only information, knowledge, but without application it won't change anything. To succeed as a trader, a profession that can very realistically turn you into a millionaire, you need to commit time to develop new skills, build new habits, train your intuition, make corrections in your behavior and adapt as you make progress. It's a much slower process than most people think when they first fall for the unrealistic adverts that sell trading as a get rich quick opportunity. But if you do this properly, it is one of the most rewarding things you will ever do. What I would say is don't give up. The number one predictor of success in any field is perseverance. Re watch this course, make notes, make a plan and put the work in if you haven't already. Consider subscribing to the channel, and I will continue to add videos and lessons which I hope you will be able to use to improve your trading even further. Thanks for watching.