A MASTERCLASS On How To Heal Your Mind & NEGATIVE THOUGHTS! | Lewis Howes

So the emotional context and memories related to trauma, be it emotional, physical or a combination, requires memory. Mind health and emotional regulation, likely the most important thing, but also other things like.

The brain has the ability to heal from traumatic, from trauma then, physical and emotional trauma, because I feel like the emotional hidden trauma can be more painful and harder to recover for some, the psychological, emotional trauma than the physical trauma. You can see it and you can treat the physical trauma in a sense, but depending on how intense it is, but the emotional, psychological, hidden traumas, I feel like, are invisible and people don't think they need to treat it because they don't see a broken arm and say, I need to go to the doctor because my bone is sticking out. put a splint on it and heal it up, we're not trained that way.

There is no easy answer. But what I will say is that trauma, these are my concepts. There's therapeutic trauma. And what I mean by that is resetting a bone after it's broken, the pain of a cancer surgery, but then you know that your cancer has been cut out. that's good pain.

Right.

And we're just talking about physical trauma.

Yes.

Then there's emotional trauma if people are attacked, that's also intimately connected to emotional trauma, right? So the people who don't have memory after certain injuries or operations, they never have PTSD because they don't remember it. So the emotional context and memories related to trauma, be it emotional, physical or a combination, requires memory. That's cool, right? I like to think about like just as a concept. I don't have a solution for, I don't, hey, don't do these three things, you'll be better. Sort of not my approach, because when people did that with me, I was like, how do you know what I'm going through, man? You look at me, you think everything's good, are you sure? Are you sure I wasn't attacked last night? Are you sure I didn't find out that my patient didn't do well last night? Are you sure? I didn't find out a loved one was diagnosed with something. You know, like, I just don't want to put people in boxes. In fact, I want people to know that they are new every day. I'm not even the same version of myself I was before the last few years. How can I be understood as a group of people, a man or a surgeon? You know, I just want people to think of each other as individuals and dynamic. That said, I never judge people's trauma to be better or worse. People are looking or stronger or justified. They're looking at everybody's going to have a traumatic event in their life. Whether it's a car crash or hearing, it's unavoidable. It's partly because we put ourselves out there. It's partly because the way we approach the world is to be completely adaptive. If we're rigid, then there's less chances for trauma, but that's a life less well lived. So when you put yourself out there, traumatic experiences are unavoidable. That said, okay. So that said, yeah, you get a bruise.

What I'm gonna hear you say is that if we don't have the memory of the traumatic event, we don't have PTSD. We don't have trauma, we don't have a trauma tail.

Right, so that's the That's the concept that I want people to walk away and say, Memory is important. Memory is the thing that determines whether the event remains traumatic in your life.

Whether it's painful still for you.

So let's get into that.

So we just need to heal the memory of the trauma.

That's exactly where I'm taking it. Very good. Memories are not files in a cabinet.

In the brain, how is memory categorized?

Again, There are some regions that if we remove them, you would lose memory, but memory is not only there. It relies on pulling from memories of smell to new, like for example, smell is very interesting. It's one of the five senses that we can't tamp down with our thinking. So the perfume or cologne, smell and memory are intimately intertwined. And so you're pulling from all different parts of the brain. Again, memory is a certain electrical flow in the brain. But it's not, it's malleable, it's moldable. Just because you have a certain memory today doesn't mean that that experience, good or bad, will remain good or bad. Our positive vibe right now can be made negative, our negative vibe right now can be made positive as we look back at our day to day.

Really?

So when you see memory that way, then you say, okay, wait a second. I was attacked or I was hurt or something really traumatized me and when I think of it, when I smell that smell, when I see that color, I am traumatized again.

I clench up, I have stress, a fear, anxiety.

So.

The emotional context to a memory is what you can change. You don't want dementia, you don't want to delete the memory because that's a different problem.

You don't want to block it.

Yeah, but what you want to do is change the emotional context attached to that memory.

What happens if we... You hear this from people a lot who might have been traumatized as kids, where they kind of block the memory and then... When it resurfaces. They resurface. It's still raw. It's very raw. But they've stuffed it, they've blocked it, they've numbed it, addicted it, whatever you.

Want to call it.

Driven it to addiction, but... Yeah, exactly.

So what happens when... I don't know. I don't know about the kid stuff as much, 'cause that's a different space and I don't want to... I want to stay where I feel real comfortable with what I've been reading and learning. So emotional context of memory for adults in the right setting with the right person through, they have their techniques, you can actually work through the trauma of the memory and the experience by going to certain therapists who help you get.

Better with that process, the memory.

Yeah, just to take the emotional pain, the emotional trauma and dampen that so you can say, for example, yeah, I was, you know, I'm just bringing examples from my world. Yeah, when I was diagnosed with cancer, that's a traumatic event. And then you see my patients, you see them over time through different ways. When they say, they say, I was diagnosed with cancer and I did this. Their face is different. describing it later than it was immediately after receiving the diagnosis. So that's a real life example, right? It doesn't have to be all the stuff related to violence and all that.

Sure.

The traumatic experience of a cancer diagnosis and how patients cope with that immediately and then you see them months later, years later, because I'd be a mess, right? I'd be like, okay, this is I wouldn't be able to cope. But surprisingly, not some of them, most of them cope. They get dressed, they come in for their three-month scans, which to me would be a traumatic experience every time. Is this guy gonna tell me it's back or it's bigger? I mean, think about it, like, getting nothing in your mail or email. I gotta go in for this news again. But somehow they cope. And that's where in Life on a Knife's Edge, I learned so much from them. that it's possible to cope with traumatic experiences. I'm not saying you as an individual can, I'm not saying I can, but when you look at a group of cancer patients and most of them cope, live, move on from very traumatic emotional experiences as well as physical experience of cancer pain and cancer surgery, right? That's the lesson I want everybody to go through in their mind when they're dealing with their own challenges. Wow.

What's the biggest lessons you've learned from the cancer patients you've treated on the way they process and handle their journey? From first hearing about they have cancer in the brain or a tumor or something to recovery, what's the biggest lessons you've learned there?

It doesn't all end well.

Really?

Some suffer. many suffer in their own ways. So it's not this nobody wishes cancer upon somebody else or on you. So it's not like this thing, it's not an opportunity. I don't want to ever present it that way. But those that have coped well, they invariably say, I wish I would have lived my life the way I am now after a cancer diagnosis.

Oh man.

Like I wish I would have lived my life having seen the finish line relatively because it changes how they live and they're not sad. It's a generalization. Like I said, some have suffered, many have suffered, but they wish that they would have made quality of life a priority throughout life, not after the cancer diagnosis. Something about seeing the finish line on the horizon makes people go, I don't like that guy. I'm not gonna see him much. This is something I enjoy. I want to, you know, they get, they get, they get after it. They get to, they get to the business of living in the way they want to deep down inside, but often have been encumbered by the, the weirdness of interpersonal relationships and career and society.

And pressure and everything else. How do you show up in your personal life after seeing all this for the last couple decades or, I guess.

That's a heavy question, you know, I can't say that I've always dealt well with it. The human stories were important, but I was just, I was going for perfection of the craft.

You were trying to be a precise surgeon, just trying to remove it and fix it.

Yeah.

And then, you weren't as connected to the human stories. You were just like, Let me.

I wouldn't say I was disconnected, but from the fifth to the tenth year, approximately, when the craft became occupied less of my mind.

Because it was more automatic. Obviously everyone's specific, but it's more automatic.

It was in a rhythm. And actually enjoyed the challenge. And that's what you want as a cancer surgeon who's trying to be the best for you and be the best for them at this craft. That's an interesting intersection. They want me to be the best. They want me to have ambition at being the best surgeon. which means tackling the biggest cancer and the people who chose me to perform their surgery have the fewest complications. Biggest mountain, fewest complications. That's a personal ambition that aligns with what the cancer patients wanted. So that was an interesting thing. It drove me and at the same time, I could see that since I take care mostly of stage four cancer and there's no stage five.

Really? that stage five means what?

There is no stage five. That means death. Okay, so stage four is, the word terminal is not fair, but stage four is the most advanced cancer. So all my patients live a few years, let's just say that. But that means, you know, after a while, you know, I was like, I've cared for like over a thousand people and they're no longer alive.

Wow.

And it started to mess with my head, man.

And, because stage four, there's no way to cure it, is what you're saying.

Stage four, by definition, other than in blood cancers, is not curable. so the question is can we get out a few...

Extend life, yes.

And quality life during that time. Oh my gosh, man. That's what I'm asking. Yeah, so after a while I was like, man, I got a drawer full of invitations to funerals.

Oh my gosh.

And I just stood back a little bit and I was having some struggles in my own life. And so the answer to your question is for those For those who are involved in cancer care to make yourself vulnerable to actually sort of in piecemeal go on their difficult journey with them. It can be hurtful. It was raw. The last five years though, the last three years, I've been able to take that and write about it and see that I have been fortified by letting them teach me and the privilege of them saying, Come along with me in my difficult times. This airplane must crash and you will ride with us. We choose you to ride with us, but you have the parachute at the end. And after a while, I was just telling my kids that, man, I just feel like I'm crashing a lot of planes. And so it went from not noticing it to noticing it and having it mess with me to, wait a second, that might have been the biggest gift of my craft, is to learn from the people in their most difficult times and how they remain optimistic in the face of calamity. So I'm in a different space about the last couple of years. But that's probably the best question anybody's asked me in the last couple of years. I appreciate it.

But of course, man.

Wow.

So how do you personally manage your mind and your brain health knowing that I mean is there any I guess survival rate after a few years of any patient that you work on?

Few. Yeah.

So maybe it's more of a stage three cancer I guess or it's- yeah, yeah.

The earlier stages have cure potential.

Yeah.

When they come to see me- you-'re at the stage three. It's usually that it's spread to the brain. from a cancer in the body that's broken out.

Gotcha. And is there no way to see to do a surgery on a brain that has less cancer at stage one or two and remove it fully? Is that possible?

Some.

Or is it hard to see that?

Yeah. There's two types of brain cancers. One that grow from the flesh of the brain and they come in different stages and more commonly are those that spread to the brain. Jimmy Carson or Jimmy Carter, president, is 90-something and he's got melanoma that's in the brain, but it was that, you know, so it's not always, but for breast cancer or lung cancer that spreads to the brain, it's sort of the final manifestation of the cancers. Oh man. Now, but those are heroic stories to me, right? That, oh man, that look you gave me, That was me five, six, seven, eight years ago. Like, man, this is good, you know. But the last couple of years, it's, man, they made it to the graduation. They made it to, you know, moms are always like, I just want to get to where my kid is out of high school.

There's something. Is there kids with it?

No, moms have breast cancer in their 40s. They got a kid in 15 years old in ninth grade. And they're, yeah. But so when you see them, it's, like I said, it's, I don't, It's not sad at all for me anymore. It's actually how rare of a gift that I can see people at their most valiant.

Oh my gosh.

And so now it informs me, but back to your original question, there was about five years where it was just messing with my mind.

How does someone, this is more of a educational question I guess for people, how does someone prevent cancer? And where does most of these cancers come from? random that people just get it if they're whatever genetics, is it their environment, their levels of stress, their food intake, is it anxiety that they're dealt with, trauma that they're not processing, what is the cause of most cancer?

There are cancers we potentially give ourselves from our bad choices, really.

Give me Smoking. Okay, yeah.

But not everybody that smoke gets it. And 20% of lung cancer people never smoke.

Really? Where do they get lung cancer from if they're not smoking?

So, do you remember I was talking about the brain being this garden and stuff like that? Well, our bodies, they're not an interesting garden in my opinion, but they're a garden too. Skin is shedding off, liver cells grow. So when things grow, they can sprout weeds. Parts of the body that don't ever change, strangely, heart never gets cancer. Things that don't change don't sprout. Cancers. It's a byproduct of constantly having cells in our bodies die and regrow. When you do that regrowth process, you're going to spin off something that doesn't behave.

How do you spin off things that are healthy?

And.

Flourishing as opposed to little weeds here and there. How do you, how do you, well you're doing both. How do you do your, so well.

I'm talking about physiologically before we get to the mind. It's an interesting point. Thoughts can be thought of that way too. The body when it, it's 99% of the time is doing the right thing. We're both here. But when you do it with a sheer volume of a lifespan and you do it over seven billion people, you're gonna sprout some cancers. So you get cancers in the body, cancers in the brain. Can our thoughts become cancerous? That's a provocative.

And can our thoughts heal cancer?

That's a very provocative thought. I have not seen positive thinking. There's no, I'm not saying it's not possible. And I encourage people to do it. But I think positive thinking, meditating, cultivating optimism, all of these things, they do change the global physiology of your body. Okay, I think we were just the.

Brain, but the body.

Right. And that in turn can affect what's going on in the brain. But I don't know if a thought can send an electrical zap to a tumor and hurt the tumor. But a certain way of thinking can make you have a certain physiologic response which there in turn could, you know, get in the way of cancer's progression.

That's why, I mean, I feel like if we're breaking this down from what I'm hearing you say, there's a garden in our brain. There's a garden, right?

And how-- Think of it as a garden.

I think of it as a garden or a school of fish, you know, working harmony.

Working together.

All these different things, right? So if our-- if we have a level of thinking that is Let's call it positive. Let's call it beautiful thinking as opposed to suffering-based thinking. Beautiful thoughts, joy, gratitude, happiness, peace, appreciation, acknowledgement, self-love and love for others. Let's say those types of thoughts versus the opposite of suffering type thoughts. If we have those thoughts on a consistent basis in the mind, would those then in fact penetrate the brain to flourish more healthy... To nurture that part of the garden. The 100 billion jellyfish floating in harmony, would they be in more harmony and healthier as opposed to penetrating it with these suffering based thoughts? And then in return, with the brain activated and flowing and not having these breaks and blocks, then it's signaling down to the body to send a more healthy ecosystem throughout the body and then returning the body back to the brain and back to the mind and having.

A more... Let me unpack that for you because that's an enormous question that I think I have a very specific answer. Because I think when we were talking about this earlier, language can be confusing if it's if it's used too casually. But let's take the cancer part out for now.

Yes.

But yeah, being in a better frame of mind, exercising, eating right, feeling calm, stress, all of that changes things physiologically that make your whole body better at fighting cancer. That we agree on, that's measured. Now, let's go back to the brain as a garden.

Yes.

So can we cultivate that part of the garden or can we cultivate a garden that lean towards a positive mind frame?

Yes.

Because if bombs are falling, even the most optimistic garden will go into threat response. You don't only want to be chill. You don't only want to be positive.

You want to be aware. You want to be flexible. You want to be all these things.

So let's say there is an external stress around Yet you're too jacked up, you're too stressed. That's a common ailment of city life, at least here where we have safety. This is really fascinating. It's one of my favorite things that I love talking about. You remember we talked about the reptilian brain? Uh-huh. You get knocked out and you stay awake. And then we talked about the mushroom canopy. Well, there's another one in the middle called the limbic system, but I call it the emotional brain. Categories are not that simple. But it's got its own little anatomy. Like if there was a slice down the side of my head, you would actually see the mushroom canopy, and you'd see some unique Star Wars looking structures in the middle, and then you'd see the reptilian brain.

The stem. Yeah, the stem. The stem is the reptilian brain, and in the middle is the limbic system.

And on top is the mushroom. Right, that's the cortical. We call it the cortical canopy. We used ecological terms to describe it in journals. So the cortical canopy and that emotional brain, the limbic system, they have branches towards each other, measurable. And so when somebody goes from age 16 to being wild to being 18 and more composed, let's say adolescence, the structure of the brain hasn't changed. It weighs the same, it looks the same on MRIs, but the person's totally different, right?

Why?

Well, because of the cultivation of thought from the cortical canopy, the mushroom cap, to the emotional brain, as they integrate more, you're able to say, Hey, maybe don't run across that freeway or maybe wear that seatbelt.

It's learning.

But it's interacting with emotions. At the same time, you don't want to be emotionless. So emotion is making a push back to thought. Like, no. Love is an emotion. This pain I'm feeling because mom is sick is an emotion. I don't wanna be spock about it or tamp it down. So that cultivation of thought and emotion is what is the most lush way to live because then you're adaptive to stress. Like, hey, this is actually something dangerous going on, thought is coming in.

Be aware of it.

Emotions going on. But at the same time, you have this internal, what they call emotional regulation. Like nothing's wrong. and you're just freaked out. And that's where those branches, thought, meditation, therapy, counseling, hugging your puppy, it creates a better balance between thought and emotion. And that tone, not on off. Thanks for asking this question. I love this. The tone is what life is about. you become a new parent, let that emotion run rampant, cry. You're about to go see your boss and you know it's not gonna go well and you're starting to do things that you know is emotion running rampant, then use thought and breathing exercises.

Turn the volume down.

Just set the tone a little different on that and then go and see your boss or your lover or some conflict situation you're in. That is what we're doing throughout life And the example of it is adolescence, where it happens for most of us automatically, but then we stop, like we're grown ups. That tone is something you cultivate through the experiences of life. And then when you get older, or when the next trauma comes, you're better braced and positioned for how to cope with this. A little more thought, because I'm running hot on emotion, or like, Man, I'm too cold about this right now. It is a raw situation. I need a safe place to let my emotions run wild.

Right, a safe environment, yeah.

That's the way I approach the intersection of thought and emotion.

Yeah, I think you said it, emotional regulation, I feel like is for me one of the most powerful skills that someone can learn in relationships, in career, in driving, you know, on the street with other people around.

Emotions are dominant, by the way, which is great. So it's usually emotional regulation, not thought regulation.

Right, but learning how to have emotional regulation, is such a powerful skill for each individual.

And we're never done because you don't know what's coming. But it's the tending to the garden. It's the lifelong cultivation.

Because what's happening if we allow our emotions, the limbic part of the brain is the emotion-based part of the brain.

Thought is the... No exact regions, but there is some anatomy relative to that. But yeah, I'm with you.

It's more of the main focus of the brain. Obviously, if it was taken out, it would regulate, but-- Emotionally, if the emotion is-- if you're always in reaction mode, you see something, ah, you're in freak out mode, you're in scream mode, you're in defensive attack mode, I'm in someone's hurting me mode, if you're always in that space, what happens to the brain physiology? What happens to the actual physical aspect of the brain and how does that affect the body and the mind if your emotions are always running high?

Oh, I love this question, man. Because when I was reading about, oh, let's go. No, because this is what can empower people is an understanding of how things lean and how things that can be modified. Otherwise it's just, I can't tell my cancer patients just, Try not to stress out. It's hollow. It's shallow. It's rude actually. So I think there's too much of that advice going on. What I want to show people is how we're sort of designed, our natural inclinations, and then you come up with your approach. I'm telling you, hugging my son got a puppy in the pandemic. That man, that's my therapy dog. I didn't even understand the con, I hugged that animal.

And you brought so much peace and love.

I'm telling you, my physiology changes.

Calm.

Yeah, it just, so everybody's got to have an individual approach to that. So here's the two things about emotions. We could cut out the thinking, just to put it coarsely, cut out the thinking brain and you'll still be alive. If you somehow were able to take out that middle part of the brain, there is no life left. The consciousness relies on emotions. On emotions.

Consciousness relies on emotions.

Yeah, because they spark through.

Right?

Remember the branches? Frontal lobe, deeper branching, intersecting the global waves of electricity. That's why there's something called deep brain stimulation. Just let me riff on this for a second. Go for it. So, well, we want people to not wash their hands 150 times a day or have Tourette's or sometimes depression or sometimes a drive for obesity or certain tremors. We take a little catheter. and just the tip isn't covered in plastic. And we put it into the emotional-- Come on, the limbic brain.

The limbic brain. You stick it down through the top of the mushroom. What do you call it?

The cortical-- Cortical canopy, yeah.

Cortical canopy. You can punch through that.

You can punch through that and it doesn't affect you. You guys can look it up, deep brain stimulation, DBS. It's been around for 40 years. Yeah, yeah. So we put it through. So those drives that Tourette's, the OCD, We don't tickle the cortical, the thought. You're not just tapping on the top.

It's an emotional job. Oh my gosh. So you're sticking it in through the.

Middle of the brain and what happens? And then the tip with just a little pulse, like the brain's pacemaker, and.

It changes the electric.

It's so wet.

It's not brand new. I understand. But why would it work? You can pulse the limbic brain.

How long do you do this for? Five minutes, an hour? What is this process? They wear it under their clavicle, like.

Grandma with a pacemaker. So you're keeping in all the time?

Yeah. You were right here.

What do you do? I mean, do you just push a button when you're freaking out and it kind of relaxes you?

So, the waves on that lake?

Yeah.

If I also jumped in on the other side, when those waves come towards each other, sometimes they negate each other, right? Similarly, the right electrical pulse can reset the electrical waves in your brain that we were talking about earlier. That's how deep brain stimulation has worked for 40 years.

So how do we create Deep brain stimulation on our own?

Oh, that's a good question. Let me answer the first one. I'll get back to that. Deep brain stimulation on our own is through paced breathing. Let's get back to that one.

Breathing, meditation, and I'll show you the anatomy for that.

Because as we talked about, I need somebody to explain it to me. I can't just say do this. Emotional regulation is tricky in two ways. Hot emotions lead to high heart rate, surging blood pressure, lots of things being released. We've already heard about them. So you're running your body in overdrive for no reason, you're wearing yourself out. That makes sense to people, okay? That's a good reason to be physiologically not stressed if you can and you come up with your coping maneuvers. What's more interesting is the intersection of the frontal lobes of the thinking brain and the emotional brain is that emotions are, they're coming in favored. They're always hot. The thinking brain has to do more of the work. and at some point, if you are not able to cultivate emotional regulation, it becomes a feed forward thing because the connections start to sever and then you start having this emotional brain that's no longer being tamped down or paced or controlled by the thinking brain. So emotional regulation is the life skill to deal with the trauma coming up. to rev your body down, but if you don't try to cultivate it, you'll actually lose control of it. And as you get older, you'll have more rampant uncontrolled emotions and not be approaching life the way you want to. So that's the answer about emotional regulation.

Do emotions have more power over thoughts or thoughts have more power over emotions?

We start off with the emotions are generally on overdrive compared to thought. So thinking through emotions, thinking which emotions have earned the right to be there, is that lifelong process. And people are like, what does that mean? Well, take adolescence. Teenager goes from 15 to 19, very different person. And that's all emotional regulation, right? Thought was losing. Teenagers, I miss it actually, it was a wild time. But then thought comes into balance emotion.

Reflection and thinking.

So take that thing that you know happens. if they're of value to you, and then say, now let me take the wheel of that thing that happened without me actually choosing or driving. That maturity happens on its own. Now let me take the wheel of that process and try to do it for the rest of my life, every year, every moment, and not just say, Hey, whatever I got at 18-19 is who I am. Going back to your first thing, you're new every day. It's a responsibility to cultivate that emotional regulation through thought and through certain behaviors for our whole life because you never know what's gonna happen, pandemic, war, and you want to be best braced for that and not approach that as a 15 year old.

Right, you want to have more awareness and I don't know if you want to call it control, but I think you want to have control over your emotions and not let your emotions control you to do something.

Control the ride a little bit, control the roller coaster a little bit, trim the sails.

Exactly. So that emotions are mostly based in the limbic part of the brain, right? Obviously it's all connected in certain areas, but if you're talking about an area, and so what's the best way to train the emotional part of the brain? So that we are in, we have a personal power over it. That's a good role. That we're in control that we have.

Or more. It depends on the situation.

We can turn it up or turn it down and we are-- Depending on.

The, depending on what's going on.

Maybe we need to be a more emotional in a moment and not be.

Chill and relax when there's an attack. Yeah, maybe the moment is so big, man. It's, of course you're just emotionally over the top. And we know that's what's been going on the last couple of years and even today. So, but that, but that leaves you a flexibility and also leaves you without feeling bad, like, oh, I was emotional then. Now I'm not an, I, I'm not a person that has emotional regulation. You don't have this brain. the same forever. It's a constant trimming of the sails, modulating tone. To me, it's a little bit of work if you're in a good spot, like, hey, this ain't guaranteed. But it's also so much power and opportunity that if you're not in a good spot, like, tomorrow can be better. And if not tomorrow, then the month or the year after, right?

So how do we learn to reframe our mind or rewire our mind so that we can have inner peace when there is trauma or pain around us?

Brilliant question.

It's a skill that we learn. So that's really nice to know. The sooner, it's never too late to start, but the sooner we start, the better. So I have four adult children. They learned this, they grew up with this stuff. And as I've learned new things, they've been my lab rats. So they've been trained in literally at my husband, and they all work for.

Me, by the way. They're either all amazing kids or messed up kids.

Totally, yeah. Yeah, we'll have to ask that question. Well, Dominique's my producer, so I think she's sort of doing okay there. But yeah, no, the thing, the biggest thing with the mind and managing mind, Lewis, is to accept that depression, anxiety, even the scary words like bipolar and schizophrenia and then going to the mood sort of things like that we can accept grief, anger, Etc. These are not illnesses. This is the biggest message that I probably have. The second biggest, the first is that mind is the source. And if you don't get mind right, everything else, you can read all the great books you want and go to all the great seminars and self-help but unless your mind is right, you won't even use that stuff. It's just data. And so you, there's another step missing and it's understanding that autonomy, that sense of agency that we have to manage what's going on around us and to accept part of mind management is not to make the bad stuff go away, but to know how to live in the bad stuff because it's not going away. So despair, anger, depression, anxiety, these are all completely normal responses. In fact, they're very helpful. They're helpful Messengers and warning signals as opposed to being scary illnesses. They are not neuropsychiatric brain diseases like we've been told. They are actually responses and because they are responses of our mind in the world, we use our brain and body to express them because we've got the mind has to have the brain and body to build the thoughts and then from we use that to speak. We're using our physical to store what we've processed and to convert and then to speak. So obviously if our mind's a mess, our brain and our body will be a mess. But because our brain's neuroplastic, and if we manage our mind, we can change our brain. We can change our DNA. Literally, that's what I've shown in my research. You can literally change your DNA, your blood markers, literally. If you change your mind? If you change your mind, you can immediately influence your biomarkers. So for example, if you are in acute trauma, for example, and you go through, okay, let me explain it in a very simple way. I've been testing out a glucose continuous glucose monitoring device, and for some research purposes. And I happened to, while I was wearing it, 'cause you wear it, and then you track your levels. and I wanted to see for in terms of mental health and the neuro cycle that I've developed, I wanted to see the impact. And I happened to be going through, experienced a very acute tour mental family over December. And in the moment of the trauma, I happened to see on my glucose monitor that my glucose had shot up to 240. Now that's heart attack level. And I immediately managed my mind through the neuro cycle, which is the concept that I've developed, which is just a system. Anyone can learn it. And I dropped my glucose levels within seconds back down to a normal level. And as it cycled up, it cycled, I could manage it. And if glucose is at that level, your cortisol's shot up at that level, your DHEA's dropped, your homocysteine's up. All that means is that your immune system is going crazy. Exactly. You've got a cytokine storm like we talk with COVID And in fact, your brain's immune system and your body's immune system will recognize that traumatic event or that established trauma or that mismanagement of whatever, that it will recognize that as an invader like a virus, like COVID. So you get the same response to a mind thing, a thought, which is the consequence of mind. Think, feel, choose, you build thoughts. Thoughts are made of roots and trees, branches, which are the memories. So thoughts are made of memories, like trees are made of branches. This is toxic. It will stimulate the same response in the immune system as if I had COVID, or if I had a flu virus, or if I had measles or something, or any kind of damage in my body. The immune system sees that as threatening survival because we are wired for survival. So this is not survival. So your immune system says, Hey, that's a threat. Let's send out the army. T lymphocytes, B lymphocytes, macrophages. Let's go fix this thing. And it creates inflammation, which is a temporary state of healing. So initially inflammation is to isolate and fix.

To protect.

Exactly. Isolate and fix. And then you're supposed to, you know, fix this up and sort this out and find the root cause. And then this goes away. And then the anti-inflammatory factors come in and the inflammation goes away. But if we don't deal with the stuff and we don't deal with our past traumas and we don't deal with those patterns in our life that we are in enacting, that's a constant argument or these certain, you know, we all have these toxic patterns or no one's immune. And the signals of those are things like depression and anxiety and those are simply telling you, hey, there's a pattern. It's either trauma-based pattern or it's a toxic habit you've developed. But that pattern is actually putting your body under tremendous stress. Even to the point where your DNA is affected. And I showed in my research that, you know, if you think of the DNA ladder, if you pull out a chromosome, it looks like an X, and where you see my fingernails, pink fingernails, for those of you that are listening, the pink fingernails would then represent what we call telomeres. And telomeres are a proxy for how.

You are managing your mind. Very interesting. Aren't they also based on how long you'll live as well?

Exactly. totally correct.

So those are under attack and dying. You're probably physically going to die as well.

Exactly. That's exactly what I showed. So we had subjects at the beginning of, in my clinical trial that I put in this book, we had subjects, and I've actually got a picture of this person's, one of the subject's brains. This is inside looking inside their brain. And the blue represents someone who's totally depressed. Flatline, brain, flatline, literally. And this person's, all their biomarkers were up there. cortisol, inflammation, etc. But this shows that the energy levels in the brain are very flat blue means a very, very depressed. And this person was, their narrative was tremendous turmoil in their life. They were offline, they were battling with work, relationships, a lot of stuff.

Everything was off.

Everything was off sleep, you name it. They were at like 3 to check out.

What page is this on?

This is on page... I should tell you, I should know the page off my heart. 161.

Okay, cool.

I think you've probably got it in black and white in that version that you've got there. So this person's telomeres, when we looked at their DNA and we looked at their telomeres, they will tell you how the shorter they are, the weaker your cells, the shorter your lifespan, the more vulnerable you are to disease. So they were sitting, so that will show in terms of your biological age. So their telomeres were short and unhealthy. They, their ages were in the, of this particular subject, and we had a group like this as well that similar. They, they biological, the chronological, the actual age was in their mid-30s, but their.

Biological age- 70 or something.

Yes, a sickly 70 year old.

That's crazy.

Within crazy, within nine weeks of mind management. No, I didn't work on, I don't use drugs. I didn't, I do talk about diet and stuff, but in this particular clinical trial was pure mind management, just the neuro cycle. just get your mind under control. And that gray means that their brain stabilized, that the brain waves that they were actually managing. So here they were saying, I am depression. I am hopeless. All the biomarkers, DNA, here they're saying, I felt, I now know why I feel depression. I'm not depression. I now know why. And depression is simply a signal of an underlying cause. It's not who I am. It's not an it. It's not an illness. By 63 days, and these numbers are very significant, they were actually seeing behavior change in their life. They were saying, okay, so I know I'll still get depressed, but I know why and I know what to do. And there was changes in their behavior. They were back at work. They were back sleeping. 25% improvement in sleep. And I mean, all kinds of like their relationships, not suicidal anymore. And I mean, that's, I can go on and on and on. Wow. This subject over here was in the control group, so they got no mind management. And what you'll see is a lot of red and a lot of chaos. And that red shows completely a sheep brain that is like a tsunami in your brain, which the biomarkers were terrible, this person's DNA telomeres were very short. And so with mind management in nine weeks, we showed how you can literally change your telomeres, which are your markers for aging and for health, mental health and physical health. And that's pretty unusual because most of the work on telomeres has been done around diet and exercise, which are very.

Similar, like, you know, leafy greens and plant-based.

Exactly. Which is significant. And also there's been some work on meditation, but there's been no, no, I think this is the first study that's been done on actually doing deliberate intentional mind work to change. And then we saw significant drops as well in inflammation markers and blood markers. And, but the biggest thing was their narrative, the person's story. So if we go away from the biology for a minute and we listen to the person's story, that person was offline, they were online, they were living again. And even though, and they had also had this, this acceptance, and this is what I wanted to kind of circle back to when you started, was life and managing your mind doesn't mean that it's going to be one big rosy, you know, put on rose-tinted glasses. That's crazy. It is actually the ability to be okay and at peace with having moments of depression and actually looking for the message and seeing them as helpful. We have this really weird philosophy, which has been about 40 years in the West now, where we look at depression and anxiety and those kind of things as illnesses, and neuropsychiatric brain diseases and as bad symptoms that you must suppress, like cancer symptoms you must suppress. So it's been lumped or misery of life has been medicalized to quote a brilliant psychiatrist and Dr. Anna Moncrieff. So we've got to really watch out for that. But actually the real truth is that those depression and anxiety are not illnesses, they are just survival instincts.

It's telling you, hey, pay attention, there's.

Something going on, you need to go and uncheck. Something's not working. some is not working and it's manifesting as a pattern that needs to be.

Addressed and that will block the greatness. So are you saying, am I hearing, did I hear you say that there isn't a mental health disease? It's more of just a pattern or something that we should be mindful of.

But it's not an actual disease? No, it's not a disease. And I know this counters the current philosophy, but if you look at the science, there's a large body of science. In fact, if you interpret all the science around this field, you really look at what's tested, you actually will see it's not a, they've been looking for the neurobiological correlates, they've been looking for where in the brain is depression. And for years we've been told about the serotonin imbalance causing depression. I mean that's not even, it was a theory never proven, great for marketing, for, you know, for selling drugs and also the simplistic way of telling someone, hey you're depressed, don't worry it's chemically imbalanced, let me give you a drug to fix it. You know, we want this quick quick fix mentality. So with as medicine has advanced and technology has advanced, so we've become very caught up in the quick fix. And but life's not like that. Mind is not like that. Mind is separate from brain and body. You can apply that kind of thinking, not quick fix, but you can apply a symptomatic diagnosis treatment approach to body, to physical brain and body. But when it comes to mind, that's that there's this gravitational field, this force, this think field, choose thing, it's not going to go in a medication is not going to change how you're thinking, feeling and choosing. It's not going to get rid of this. It's just gonna numb your brain. So maybe you don't feel this for a while it's working. But at the same time as then when that drug wears off, this is still there. This is still being recognized by the immune system of your brain as a problem. So this is increasing your, the longer it's there, the more you increase your vulnerability to disease. Oh my gosh. You know, and this is what gets you stuck. And these are the patterns. So no, it's not an illness. It is a normal human response. Here we, pandemic, we all know that Everyone's going on about the next pandemic is mental health. Mental health has always been an issue. From the beginning of time, mankind has battled with life, with issues, with death, with fighting, with war, with whatever. So mental health's not on the rise, but the mismanagement of mental health, making it a disease, has created a whole new problem. So here we sit with, before the pandemic, they started doing a population study in the mid 90s, and this is when I was still practicing, early days of my practicing, sort of 10 years into my work, and I started seeing this trend of, and I was watching the study where people were, the decades long trend of people living longer. So we know, we all hear this message, this is what we've heard, people are living longer because of the advances in medicine and technology. None of us question that. But something happened in '96 that did start questioning that. By the mid-2000s, it was an established researched fact that we don't live longer anymore, that the trend of people living longer has actually reversed. and that we have a pandemic of deaths of despair, where people are dying from preventable lifestyle diseases and the age group most being affected are between 24 and 65. So people at the beginning of their career and the prime of their career and through that age group are dropping down dead like flies. And it's considered deaths of despair by preventable lifestyle diseases. So we have to look at the bone, lifestyle disease means that there's something in our body that's that's weaker. Why? Lifestyle, which is mind driven. How am I eating, drinking, sleeping? But more than that is what's my mind behind all of that? How am I actually managing the day-to-day moments? How am I managing the patterns, the traumas, the established toxic habits? What am I doing about that stuff? And that's when we ignore all of that, because this current trend of science is saying, oh, those don't matter. What matters is the symptoms. Let's just look for the symptoms. Checklist. diagnose, label. When you label someone, you chop up to 10 years more of their life. You know, it's like it's adding on, they've shown studies of people with a mental health diagnosis have chopped their 20 years off, up to 20 years off their lifespan. People on psychotropic drugs because of all the complications and the changes in the brain and the body chopping up to 25 years of their life. I mean, this is serious. So here we had this already existing, then the pandemic hits, Now in other years they say that there's an additional year being chopped off people's lives. But there's such a contradiction because they're saying, hey, there's this adverse circumstance, grief of loss of people, uncertainty, medical and not knowing if you're going to live or die and how long is this isolation going to go on and economic impact and whatever, the whole lot. That's trauma and they say that when they say but, this is the way to treat it. Let's label it, let's diagnose it, let's medicate it. So here we've come into COVID with a problem with that stupid philosophy that's created such a lot of problems. And scientifically, this is all being researched and shown. And now we've got the pandemic and now they want to carry on that system that didn't work to this, which is gonna make it even worse. So we've got to shift our narrative completely and we've got to stop saying that mental illness is on the rise and that there's one in four people on antidepressants or depressed. 100% of people are depressed. and anxious and concerned about this COVID pandemic. 100% of people in the world at some point in their life have and will be anxious and depressed and in grief and sadness and terror and despair and one of the others. A large percentage of the population and I'm not sure the exact percentage because no one's really done this kind of research but estimates it's probably 30-40% of people will have extreme trauma from abuse, war trauma, that kind of stuff where they'll go down the continuum to sort of the -19, 8-19 even you look at a continuum of zero to 10, zero to minus 10, and have things like psychotic breaks and hearing voices and extreme states of distress, mental distress, which are still not diseases. They are simply in that traumatic situation, you're having a traumatic response. Think of someone who's a war vet. I just interviewed a Navy SEAL the other day who was trained snipers. And I mean, the things that he had to do and that his teams had to do, you know, they come back and try and we all know the problem of trying to, you know, reconcile back into civilian life after you've gone through. I mean, you know, this is what they'd be experiencing all day long, stuff that's completely against survival, completely against our human nature. And now they, instead of them being allowed to process this trauma, they're coming back and being told that they're diseased. And he would tell me that what they do with a lot of, we don't hear this sort of thing, but he told me this, they will inject things like Risperdal, which is an antipsychotic, into the spines of war vets because they're a bit psychotic and they're psychotic for a reason. It's their coping. How do you deal with this? Of course you're going to be angry, you're going to be frustrated, you're not going to be able to love like you did. You have to be able to embrace process and reconceptualize. Giving them a drug is not going to make it, not going to help it. In fact, it constrains the brain. It restricts the brain. You can't, there's no chemical cure for that. That's just going to add fuel to the fire because your mind's got to work through the brain. So now you put chemicals in and now that's not going to facilitate change. We have to do something. So it's like a narrative.

Do you feel like there, I mean, is there such a thing as a chemical imbalance in some people? You know, when they say, oh, I have a depression, it's a disease or bipolar, or I have this mental health disease, or I have a chemical imbalance. I was treated with this. Don't try to say I don't because this is who I am. Is that, do some people have that or is that, that's a result of Go ahead.

The narrative of I have a chemical imbalance and my depression is from chemical imbalance is a narrative that is the only explanation that people have been given. They're not given an alternative reaction, I mean an alternative narrative. So the most important thing is that anyone listening to this podcast, I want to validate your depression, your anxiety, your grief, your despair, your PTSD, whatever label you've been given, I want you to, I want to validate that that doesn't need to be validated with a disease label. You're not diseased, you're not a broken brain. You aren't, your brain isn't defective. You are going through something.

So you aren't something, you aren't that.

You are going through something. You're experiencing something. You're experiencing something and you're experiencing and you've coped in the only way that you could cope in that moment. So it created this adverse response because it was an adverse situation and you were just trying to cope. So what we have to do is go through a process of embracing and processing and reconceptualizing. So the important thing here is to recognize that chemical imbalance isn't the cause of your despair. The cause of your despair is what you've gone through and what you're going through. And learning how to, not knowing how to manage it and how to deal with those thoughts that are driving you crazy and those flashbacks and the trauma of the flashbacks and going back into those situations of the rape or the abuse or the war trauma or the that it can drive a person crazy. And that's not crazy in the sense of illness. It's crazy in the sense of your mind is like this erratic tidal wave around you and it's going through your brain and you've got these and your immune system and everything screaming out to you and saying, hey, let's fix this. So a disease label invalidates it. And for a moment it might be nice to know, okay, well there's a label to how I feel because it kind of gives It feels like we've got a bit of control. So initially that gives you comfort, but don't see yourself as that. It's better to say, I'm experiencing post-traumatic stress issues because of what I've been through versus I am PTSD or I have the sickness of PTSD. It's better to say, I'm experiencing symptoms of bipolar, these intense swings because of my whole story than saying, I have bipolar, I have a chemical imbalance. I mean, just researches coming out the other day show that we've got to stop saying this. The top psychiatrist that lead this field will tell you we've got to stop saying this, that there's no ways that serotonin imbalance, you can't even measure that. There's no genes or serotonin imbalance causing it. It's what you've experienced that's the cause. And then that moves through your brain and your body. So obviously your brain and your body respond. So we will see changes in the brain and the body. We will see neurochemical chaos. not necessarily serotonin imbalance. That's just one. Sometimes it's dopamine. And if dopamine's down, serotonin's often, then anandamide's often. I mean, I can give you a list of big chemical terms and that's gonna change every function in the structure of your brain and your DNA and your telomeres and 1400 neurophysiological responses are off. So, you know, that's the response though. And that doesn't mean that you have this thing hidden inside of you, this scary thing that's controlling you. And that invalidates if someone comes back from war, someone's had a sexual trauma, to tell them that the depression or anxiety they're feeling is an illness is an insult to what they've gone through. But if I say to you, Gosh, that's terrible. Tell me about it. I want to hear your story. I want to support you. Your depression and anxiety that you're feeling is a signal that there's stuff going on. There's an origin story story. There's a source. So can I listen? Can I help? Can I support you in trying to recognize the signals and go through the process to find the origin story and then to reconceptualize it? And that's takes time. It's not a 15 minute appointment where I can give you a label. That takes time. That's not also. And it's also not the conditioning kind of treatments that are in place that some of them work if they're used in the right place. But to try and, to try and put a a veteran who's gone through something back into the situation to try and condition them. You can't condition, you have to reconstruct. So it's kind of like an algebraic equation. X is the situation. Y is how you should want, you want to function for mental peace. So you've got X plus Y. And so here we are in our X situation where we are a sort of human experiencing life. We're supposed to be at Y and you put the two together And what the current treatment says is that, okay, now we're going to create Z. We're just going to ignore X and Y. We're going to create a new thing and that new thing is you're diseased. But that doesn't work. It's actually X plus Y equals XY. X is what you're going through. Y is where you want to find mental peace.

Say I feel cold and ice, right? I'm in ice. It's 30 degrees. Can I control my mind to say, You know what? This is actually a hot tub and you feel warm and you're feeling hot right now. Or is it too much physiological barriers to break through that?

To some extent you can. So I think the question that you're asking is a very important one. It's actually the question, which is to what extent does our subjective narrative- the story we tell ourselves- the story we tell ourselves actually mean something for the body. And to what extent does the body actually mean something for the subjective narrative? So this gets into some areas of work that we're doing now, and so I do want to highlight that it's ongoing work. But I think, you know, the old narrative, meaning a few 10 years ago, was that if you're feeling depressed, just smile. Well, if that worked, we would have a lot less depression than we see out there. Now, that does not mean-- Most people.

Actually who are depressed depressed just aren't smiling as well.

That's right.

Like when you change your physiology, doesn't it also start to change the way you think about yourself a little bit?

The reason I call it a brain-body contract early on is that the brain and the body are constantly in dialogue. So, you know, the idea that when we're depressed we tend to be in more defensive type postures, when we're feeling good we tend to be in more relaxed and extended postures, all true. But it does not mean that just by occupying the extended posture that I'm going to completely shift the mind. That's a first step. Think about like two interlocking gears. It's one gear that turns the other, but then they need to kind of dance together before you can get the whole system going.

So, how do you get it to dance together?

Exactly. So, subjective, there is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful over states of mind and body. To answer your question, can you think your way out of the ice bath being cold? So a couple things that are important. First of all, just to go a little deeper on what thoughts are. Thoughts happen spontaneously all the time. They're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection. But thoughts can also be deliberately introduced. For instance, right now, I can say, okay, have a thought that just decide to write your name and you can do that. I'm going to decide to write my name and you can do it. So that's a deliberate thought which says that you can introduce thoughts. So I think it's very hard to control negative thoughts directly by trying to suppress them. Generally, they tend to just want to continue to geyser up all the time. But we can introduce a positive thought.

Can you think of two thoughts at the same time?

Probably not.

So you can only have one thought at a time.

Right, but they come very fast.

But it comes and goes. So you have to constantly be intentional and deliberate about what you think. Otherwise, and a spontaneous thought will pop back in.

That's right.

Based on your experience, based on sensory, based on how you're feeling or perceiving something, your environment, it's just going to keep popping in. So how do we deliberately have a positive thought more often?

Right.

So I'm a big fan of wellness and I think it's a great community, but it tends to run in absolutes and there aren't a lot of operational definitions as we say in science. And what I love about your questions, you're asking for really getting to the meat of things, asking for the operational definitions. One of the most dangerous ideas in wellness and in popular psychology is that your body hears every thought you have. What a terrible thing to put on people. You know, what a challenging thing. I don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts. I think there is great value, however, to introducing positive thought schemes. Now, the reason is not because I think it's just because I think so, but because there's actually a neurochemical basis for controlling stress and actually making stress more tolerable and extending one's ability to be in bouts of effort. And that relates to the dopamine pathway. So the molecule dopamine is a reward. It's released in the brain when you win a game, you close a deal, you meet the love of your life, someone likes your photo, the great love of your life, you complete something. But most of our dopamine release is not from achieving goals. It's actually released when we are in route to our goals, where we're in pursuit of our goals, and we think.

We'Re on the right path. This is why a lot of people get depressed after they achieve a big goal, because they feel like I'm supposed to feel something greater. I felt this thing for two minutes, and now that's it?

That's right. High achievers know to attach dopamine to the effort process.

To the pursuit, the day-to-day tasks, the growth, the lessons, the losses, like everything, right?

Well, and it can be to some.

Wins along the way.

But growth mindset, which is the academic discovery and laboratory discovery of my colleague Carol Dweck at Stanford, is the hallmark of growth mindset is really two things. One is I'm not where I want to be now but I'm capable of getting there eventually. The other is to attach a sense of reward to the effort process itself.

In fact, Don't reward the result, reward the effort.

That's right. And if you look at true high performers, people that are consistently good at what they do. They don't peak and go through the postpartum depression and crash and come back and their life is a cycle of ups and downs, but really people who are on that upward trajectory consistently, those people attach dopamine to the effort process. And actually Carol's, one of her original studies on the discovery of growth mindset was these kids that loved doing math problems that they knew they couldn't get right. So it's like the people love puzzles, but in this case, they knew they couldn't get it right, but they loved doing it, and it incidentally or not so incidentally, these kids are fantastic at math when there is a right answer because they feel some sense of reward from the effort process. Now, the cool thing about dopamine is that it's very subjectively controlled. We can all learn to secrete dopamine in our brain in response to things that are in a purely subjective way.

Our interpretation.

Our interpretation. But it has to be attached to reality. So, one should never confuse what is real. Right. So, if you're thinking about the effort you're expending, so let's say somebody right now is financially back on their heels and they're setting up a new business, for instance, and it's hard. If they can take a few moments or minutes each day to reflect on the fact that the effort process is allowing them to climb out of their hole potentially, that it's giving them an opportunity, that it's somehow they are on the right path or if they're not in movement along that path or at least oriented on the right path, they're not lying in bed all day.

They're taking a step.

They're taking a step. If they can reward that process internally, two things happen. First of all, the brain circuits that are associated with building subjective rewards and dopamine get stronger so you get better at that process. And second, and most importantly, dopamine has an amazing ability to buffer adrenaline and buffer epinephrine. And what I mean by that is there was a study that was published in the journal Cell, excellent journal, Cell Press journal, a couple of years ago showing that with repeated bouts of effort, We use and we release more and more epinephrine. It's kind of adrenaline but in the brain.

With more effort, we release more epinephrine. Every time.

Every time you put in effort. So every time you make, for this, let's keep it, if I were to keep it in the business context, every time you make write that email, every time you, let's see, it's a person who's a craftsman or a crafts woman, every time you're working in the shop and doing that, every bit of effort, you're taking a little bit of money out of this epinephrine account, you're spending epinephrine. At some point, those levels of epinephrine get high enough that you feel like quitting. It feels exhausted. And this was done in a beautiful study actually where they control the visual environments and they have the subjects exert effort and they can control the visual environment. So sometimes the effort of taking steps and moving forward, this is actually kind of pushing forward and kind of swimming motion, would give them the sensation that they were actually making progress. And other times it was an exercise in futility where they would just keep the visual world stationary and they would expend effort and they didn't think they were going anywhere. Epinephrine's climbing, climbing, climbing and eventually they quit. Now dopamine is able to push back on that epinephrine and give you anyone the feeling that you could continue and maybe even the feeling that you want to continue. And you've seen this actually, football is a good example. Two teams play, say the Super Bowl. Both teams are max effort the entire time. Max effort, the team that wins suddenly in a moment has the energy to jump all over the place, party for days. They can talk, I mean, they have to be exhausted.

They were exhausted right before that.

Well, that wasn't glycogen or stored energy of any kind, except it was neural energy. And what happened was effort is this adrenaline, adrenaline, adrenaline, adrenaline, eventually people quit, they just quit. The dopamine is able to suppress that, and so then you're expending effort, but you're doing it from a place of feeling like you have energy for it.

So we need dopamine to keep the effort going, is that what I'm hearing you say?

That's right. Dopamine is not just about reward. It's one of the biggest misconceptions. Dopamine is about motivation and drive. It's like a jet that propels you along a path.

How do we get more dopamine?

You practice subjectively releasing dopamine in your mind. Like how? Okay, so that's a great question. First of all, there are ways you can get more dopamine release through thoughts or through drugs or through supplements.

Really clear.

There is a drug, there are two drugs actually that will cause massive release of dopamine. They're called cocaine and methamphetamine.

The problem is that's what gets us.

Addicted because it feels so good. The problem is, exactly, the problem is cocaine and methamphetamine stimulates so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source. It becomes the goal and the path. It becomes the path and the destination. And you look at people's lives when they do a lot of cocaine and methamphetamine, and that baseline on their life goes down.

Because there's no reason to work hard at anything else because you feel good.

That's right.

And that's the greatest feeling you'll have, so why do anything else when you can have that feeling?

That's right. And if you think about, remember these neurochemical systems, adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, epinephrine, they weren't designed to keep us safe from tigers and to hunt and gather or to build Fortune 500 companies. They were designed to do anything. They were designed to be generic so that depending on our circumstances, we could adapt. So in an animal context, an animal that, let's say, is hunting or it needs food for its young, it's gonna feel agitation. That's stress. That's cortisol. It's like hunger. My babies might not eat. I might not eat. Maybe it's looking for a mate. It's gonna feel agitation and start looking and roaming and searching. It's called in the animal behavior world, it's foraging. At some point, it might catch a smell of something, a potential mate or berries or a stream if it's thirsty. At that moment, dopamine is released and now it has energy to continue along that path. Whereas there's a specific pathway in the brain that's involved in depression and disappointment that if it goes to that place, and it turns out it was the wrong path, there's a signal that actually suppresses dopamine so that you don't repeat that mistake again.

So you don't give up.

That's right. You just don't repeat it again.

That's right.

And those events that remind you like that's not the path to go down. That's right. And we're sort of veering towards neuroplasticity here, which is the brain's ability to change itself in response to experience. Dopamine is one of the strongest triggers of neuroplasticity because it says those actions led to success previously. you're gonna repeat those. Those actions led to failure previously and don't repeat those.

So dopamine triggers us to stay on the right path.

That's right. So you asked how do you do this? So to really make it concrete.

And is there too much, is there such thing as too much dopamine? Well, if you're not on drugs.

So cocaine and amphetamine are bad because they lower the baseline on life. They make people very focused on things outside of themselves. That's the other thing that dopamine does, it can be positive or negative. But when we have dopamine in our system, we tend to be outward facing and in pursuit of things in our environment. You can look at somebody on cocaine and realize that that's the extreme version of that. But, you know, I love social media for the reason that you see the molecules in the memes. So it's like, get after it, you know, what do sharks do on Monday or I can't remember the specific things. Or then they're the, like, sometimes it's just time to chill. Well, that's a different molecule. That's serotonin, right? And then dopamine is the get after it. molecule. And epinephrine is effort. So if we were going to break this down really concrete, we'd say adrenaline and epinephrine are about effort. Just effort with no subjective label on them, good or bad effort, whether or not it's stress or you're pursuing something you want to do, it's just exerting effort.

Your mind's really important and we want to help you work on your relationships, but if your brain's not right, nothing else is going to be as good as it can be.

So, if someone is doing exercises or practices in their relationships, dealing with anger management, stress, anxiety, depression, they're working on the software and not the hardware, what will happen?

This is not as effective. I mean, it can be very helpful. But just like the computer analogy. And I didn't know this. It was 1991 when I ordered my first SPECT scan. SPECT is the study we do at Amen Clinics. I'm already a double board certified psychiatrist. I'd been a psychiatrist for about a decade. And I always felt like I was throwing darts in the dark at my patients. There's a great book called the Structure of Scientific Revolution. Because if what I'm doing is right, and I believe it is, It's really creating a revolution in brain health, mental health care. And the first step of the revolution Thomas Kuhn wrote about in 1962 is you notice a flaw in the system. And I was taught, I was really well trained. I trained to be a psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. And if you have six of these nine symptoms, you get diagnosed with depression. and then I give you a medication. That's what you did for Prozac.

Right. A while.

But some of the people I'd put on Prozac got better, and some of them became suicidal. Some of them became aggressive. Some of them became obsessive and anxious. And I'm like, this isn't working like it should.

And a small percentage maybe it helps, but not for everyone.

Well, maybe even a good percentage it helps, but a good percentage it hurts, which would horrify me, because I would always feel off balance. I didn't know this would work, that would work. Plus, I didn't care about my own brain at all because I hadn't seen it. And in 1991, when I started ordering scans, I scanned my mom. She had a beautiful, healthy brain. I scanned me and it wasn't healthy. But I played football in high school. I had meningitis when I was a young soldier. And I had bad habits. I wasn't sleeping. I was eating fast food. And when I scanned myself, I developed a concept. I wanted my mother's brain. And so I called that brain envy. Freud was wrong. Penis envy is not the cause of anybody's problem. You gotta learn to love and care for your brain. And so the next 30 years, I've been figuring out how can I have a better brain? Because when I have a better brain, I have a better life. And what I realized is depression is not one thing. That's why Prozac didn't work for me. for everyone. For some people, they have really low blood flow and activity in the brain. For some people, it's really high. And for some people, they had head injuries. In fact, if you go, Hey, Daniel, single most important thing you've learned from 183,000 scans, that's how many we've done, is that mild traumatic brain injury is a major cause of psychiatric illness.

Oh, man.

And nobody knows about it. because psychiatrists, by and large, never look at the brain.

What does psychiatric illness mean? Is it the same thing as mental health disorder, mental health disease? What does that mean?

Right, I mean it's the same thing. It's people who struggle with anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, schizophrenia, attention deficit disorder, addictions.

So you're saying if we played football, we're screwed forever?

You're vulnerable. Since we played football and you're bigger and probably way better than me, so you got your head hit more. I was on the best position in the field, which is I was a backup quarterback. Best position in the field.

She went on the field, yeah.

But you're clearly more vulnerable. So in 2007, Anthony Davis came to see me. He's the Hall of Fame running back from USC. He's called the Notre Dame Killer because in 1972 he scored six touchdowns against the University of Notre Dame.

And.

He was at the time confused. He had memory deficits. He had temper problems. He's getting into fights. He had no business. And one day he's driving on the 405 and he had no idea where he was going. And he pulled over, called a friend of him at the USC School of Medicine. He says, you, should go see Dr. Raymon. And when I saw him, his brain at 54 looked like it was 90 and bad for 90. And Anthony just did everything I asked him to do. And five months later, his brain is better. He's excited. He's like, Doc, we have to talk about this. And this is at a time the NFL is really an active denial that they have a problem. And so we did a study. He helped me with the Los Angeles chapter of the NFL Players Association. They co-sponsored my first study, high levels of damage in players. And what we found, they had four times the level of depression and significantly higher incidences of dementia. But 80% of them got better when I put them on a brain health program. So it's... Wow.

Now, do you think... I know from transitioning out of sports as a professional football player, transitioning where my identity was tied to that thing for so long, that when I left and that I had this mini identity crisis for a few years of living in the past and will my life ever be the same type of Mental health, can the depression or anxiety come from the identity crisis as well? Or is it more tied to the traumas you hit? Because when I was in the game, I felt like I had a purpose, a mission. I didn't feel as stressed and overwhelmed, but it's when I left the game, when that came up, is it a.

Combination or is it. It's always a combination. Yeah, always. I always think of people in four big circles. What's the physical functioning of your brain and body? So some biological circle, which is your development, that really matters. And your ability to manage your mind. In my new book, you, Brain Is Always Listening, I talk about the ants and the dragons. The ants, the automatic negative thoughts, steal your happiness. And the dragons, the big psychological issues from the past, like the abandoned, invisible and insignificant dragon, it's my dragon, that are always sort of breathing fire on your emotional brain. So biological, psychological, social, it's like, well, how's your money? How's your relationships? I mean, we're just coming out, hopefully, of a pandemic that has spawned another mental health pandemic, right? So biological, psychological, social, and spiritual, which most psychiatrists would never touch, but 80% of the population believes in God and has deep-rooted spiritual beliefs, and it's ultimately, well, why are you on the planet? And you had lost your sense of meaning and purpose, where you had one life and then, well, all of a sudden you don't have that anymore. And I'm a huge fan of Ariana Grande's song, Thank you.

Next.

Because those three words are mental health. It's gratitude for what's happened in the past looking forward. Gratitude for your career and then like, All right, what's next? And if you had known me at the end of your career, you'd like, Good, we're not going to hit our head anymore. We're going to take care of our brain so we can do something fun. which obviously you've done.

Yeah, it's been great. We have to acknowledge the season of our life and then move on to the next season. What would you say are the three worst things we can do for our brain? If the brain health is the foundation for our mindset, our heart health, the way we view the world, what are the three worst things we can do? Whether it be taking a substance, thinking a thought, staying in a toxic relationship, being around mold all day, like what are the, you know, trauma to the head?

Well, I mean, the worst thing you can do is not care about it, is not have brain envy. That's the worst thing.

Have brain envy.

You can do. And I have a little tiny habit I love. I worked with B.J. Fogg from the persuasive tech lab at Stanford. And we worked with him for six months on how people change and we created 50 tiny habits. But my favorite tiny habit is before you go to do something today, ask yourself, takes three seconds, is this good for my brain or bad for it? And if you can answer that question with information and love, love of yourself, love of your mission.

You.

Are gonna be better. Because when your brain is better, you're better. So that's number one. If you don't care. Number two is you engage in behaviors that hurt your brain. Whether it's head trauma or thinking of marijuana as going green, it's not, it damages the brain. Alcohol is not a health food. Living in a mold-filled environment. You may know Dave Asprey. Dave and I are buddies. He got scammed about 15 years ago and it was like moth-eaten. It was terrible. But he was living in a mold-filled home. And he actually did a documentary called Moldy that I'm in on the impact of an environmental toxin on your brain. And I would say the third thing, so brain envy, engage in behaviors that hurt your brain. The third thing would be you just never do anything to help your brain, such as we talked about this before we started, table tennis, which is just a great brain game.

Yes.

Because you got to get your eyes, your hands and feet all to work together while you think about this spin on the ball. So I think of it like aerobic chess. And people never think about their cerebellum. It's the Rodney Dangerfield part of the brain. Now, I'm horrified because many young people don't know who Rodney Dangerfield is. He was a comedian who used to say, I get no respect. And then he'd talk about why he got no respect. Well, in the back bottom part of your brain, there's cerebellum actually means little brain. It's 10% of the brain's volume, but it has half, 50% of the brain's neurons. And it's involved in coordination, which is why table tennis is great for your cerebellum, but also thought coordination, how quickly you can integrate new information. And we know people have ADD, have sleepy cerebellums, people who have autism, awfully have damaged cerebellums. And so athletics are so important. These coordination exercises like martial arts is amazing. as long as you don't hit your head, as long as you don't hit your head, because the brain is soft about the consistency of soft butter, tofu, custard, somewhere between egg whites and jello, and your skull is really hard and has sharp bony ridges. This is why the thousands of blows you took to your head are just bad. Helmets don't protect brain damage, protect you from brain damage, they protect you from skull fractures. fractures. But inside your brain, your brain is doing this repeatedly and that's not a good thing. You can't like take your laptop and just drop it repeatedly and expect it to do what it needs to do.

Oh my gosh, I just keep thinking of the decades of brain hitting over and over. But I think, you know, what I love about your message and your research is that It doesn't matter if you've been through that in the past, as long as you're aware of it and you start to practice habits and routines and really set your environment up, your relationships, these four circles up for success, you can really heal a lot of the past trauma in the brain. Is that right?

Absolutely.

How much-- that's the exciting thing. How much from these scans you've done where people have had horrible looking scans, I mean, whether it be brain trauma or sexual trauma, whatever it is that they were stuck in, some type of brain trauma. And they went on a program of better lifestyle, better habits, spiritual growth, personal development. Were you able to see a significant transformation within a year, five years, 10 years? How long does this take?

Well, I have Anthony Davis's scans 10 years apart and dramatically better. Or one of my favorite NFL players, his name is Duval Love. He was an offensive of guard for the Los Angeles Rams for 12 years. And when I saw him, he's obese, he's depressed, he's been to jail, he's a mess. And he just did what I asked him to do. And that's why I love my NFL players, because they're coachable. They're used to being coached.

Tell them what to do, coach. I'll do it.

Hey, coach, tell me what to do. And he lost 110 pounds. And He's actually ended up getting his master's degree. I was like, oh my God. And he's trim, he's happy, he's fit, and his brain is radically better. Now it depends, right, on how much you played and how many hits and how damaged it is. And it also depends on the brain you brought into football because some people brought really healthy brains. Into football, they had parents who cared, they had reasonable nutrition and so on. And some people brought in terrible brains. But 80% of our people get better, especially if they do what we ask them.

Is this better in terms of like, okay, you're 80% back to a super healthy, perfect brain? Is it like, wow, this thing's unbelievable, off the charts healthy. Like everyone can envy your brain, even if you went through trauma, or is it like, it looks really good.

It depends on what you start with. One of my other players, Anthony Trucker, who I just love. His brain was suffering when I first saw him.

Really?

Are you a fan of Oregon?

Oregon football player who played in the NFL for a few years. I know trucks.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

I love him.

Good guy.

And he just did what I asked him to do.

Yeah.

And a year later, his brain's healthy.

Really?

Yeah.

So it wasn't healthy when he came in. A year later, it's healthy.

Right.

And that's the cool thing about the brain. Every day, your brain, and there's an area called the hippocampus. And so, I don't know if this is too much nerd neuroscience, but the cerebellum is really important. The hippocampus is really important because it's involved with mood and memory.

Interesting.

And it's Greek for seahorse, because it's shaped like a seahorse. And every day, the hippocampus makes 700 new baby stem cells. or new baby seahorses.

Every day.

Every day. In the brain. In the brain. It's making new cells every day. So neuroscientists, when I was taking neuroscience in medical school, they told us, you know, if you hurt your brain, sort of you're screwed, and you're not getting it back. Well, that was a lie. That the brain continues to make new neurons throughout life. And every day, you're growing those babies, if you put them in a healthy environment or you're murdering them. And funny story, came out last year, I've been Miley Cyrus' doctor for about a decade and I adore her. And she was smoking a lot of pot, as everybody knows. But she's also an animal lover. So when I told her the pot was suffocating the baby seahorses, she's like, Dr. Evan, that's so unfair. You know I love animals. You can't say that. Take that back.

Wow.

And now she's better to her brain. Just the information. No better, do better.

I'm gonna ask you some controversial questions about brain health. How much does, is it a third of Americans are obese or is it two thirds? Two thirds of Americans.

72% of Americans are overweight.

Or overweight.

42% of us are obese. I published three studies. In fact, I did an NFL study. One of them was an NFL study. I took players at the same position who were at a healthy weight versus those that were overweight. The overweight had sleepy frontal lobes. They had decreased activity in the frontal lobe. I just published a study on 35,000 people. It's one of the largest imaging studies ever done. there is virtually a linear correlation between as your weight goes up, the function.

Of your brain goes down.

Really?

Oh, morbidly obese was worse than obese, which was worse than overweight, which was worse than healthy weight.

So healthy weight versus- so healthy weight.

Would be the best activity and then overweight and then obese and then morbidly obese.

What consists as overweight versus which is obese. Is this body fat percentage?

Well, it's something called BMI or body mass index, which in NFL players actually doesn't correlate very well. For them, it's their waist to height ratio. So their waist should be half your height or less. So if you're six feet tall, that's 72 inches, your waist and you got to measure. You can't go by your pant size because the clothing industry knows that we're unhappy. And so you guys got to put a tape measure right around your belly button. And so if you're six feet, your waist should be 36 inches or less. And if it's not, then it's good to work on. Right? And you just see it as a problem to solve. But if you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it, If it's headed to the dark place, you have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors. I have a mnemonic for that I read about in the book, it's called Bright Minds. Well, if you're overweight, that automatically means you have five of the risk factors.

Really?

Because being overweight decreases blood flow. That's what my studies showed. It increases inflammation. It stores toxins, fat stores toxins, like if you smoke pie. It actually stays in your body for 30 days.

Wow.

It changes your hormones, and this is like shocking for me and my NFL work, that these big, strapping, virile men are almost all low in testosterone because when you have subconcussive blows, it damages the pituitary gland, which turns off the production of testosterone. Oh my gosh. And so, belly fat especially takes healthy testosterone and turns it into unhealthy, cancer-promoting forms of estrogen. And so, you know, you have the diobesity, risk factor, blood flow, inflammation, toxins and hormones. And so that's all from being overweight. That's all from being overweight. It's just a thing we should be working on and. What I often say is the real weapons of mass destruction, ISIS has nothing on our food industry. They're highly processed, pesticide sprayed, high glycemic, low fiber food like substances stored in plastic containers.

So can you share what that means to hear in between the lines through prayer, meditation, mindfulness and kind of what this all means? How can we understand this? There's a lot of noise about it. But what does it really mean?

When I hear the word mindfulness, to me what it really means is intentionality. What I mean by that is are you crafting, designing and intentionally creating your life or are you just coasting in the passenger seat of your life which is just dragging you and driving you wherever it's taking you? And so it's the difference between being the driver or being in the passenger seat. And so to me, living intentionally is what allows you to live a life of by design. And so I'll give you an example of what mindfulness can look like. There's something in the book that I talk about called the three S's, which are sights, sense, and sounds. Now, if you think about that, we're exposed to sights, sense, and sounds every single day.

Yeah.

Every single day. But how many of us have crafted those to be sight, sense, and sounds that we want in our life? So this is what I realized when we were monks, one of the most important things was, what was the first thing you saw, the sight, when you woke up?

And right now, most people are probably seeing their screen.

Yeah, I think 80% of people look at their screens first thing in the morning and the last thing at the night. So you've seen your screen first thing in the morning, but what are you really seeing? You're seeing everyone else's priorities. you're seeing everyone else's issues and challenges, you're seeing everyone else's messages to you, which means you're already starting your day off reactively. But what if you started your morning looking at a painting that inspired you, or a picture of a loved one that brought joy in your heart, or your favorite quote by Lewis or by anyone else that when you read that in the morning, you were like, oh yeah, I feel in charge today to make a difference in the world. So imagine the first thing you saw in the morning was something inspiring. How much would your day change? That's mindfulness. mindfulness. Mindfulness is being intentional and mindful about what you are exposing yourself to. Let's talk about sounds next. So sounds were something that I started to study actually much later from a modern life perspective. But when we were monks, we would wake up to birds, we would wake up to water, we'd wake up to gongs or cymbals. Chants. Exactly. Which are all beautiful sounds. Now, the crazy thing is All of us wake up to something called an alarm.

Now, I'm writing this like- Literally, I.

Don'T know why anyone would want to wake up to an alarm. Why would you want to wake up alarmed? It means now your system is alarming. Like, why would you want to do that? Why would you wanna wake up in shock? In a state of like a jolt? I don't think that's a positive way to wake up. So changing the sound that you wake up to, Now, I'm not saying that everyone can wake up to nature sounds. Maybe you're one of those people who just hit the snooze button again. But what if you woke up to a sound or a song that brought you joy? Now, when I lived in New York for two years between 2016 and 2018, I started to feel quite exhausted by the end of the day. And I was really looking into like, why is it that I feel tired? And I started to realize I came across this term called cognitive load. And what it means is that a lot of the sounds that you hear in New York City are sounds that are insignificant for your mind to process. Drilling, construction work, taxis honking, driving, cars screeching, scratching, people yelling at each other. People yelling at each other on the streets. All of that sound is called cognitive load, where your brain is now trying to make sense of meaningless sound.

It's also just like, should I be afraid? This is a loud sound. There's my brain going to fight or flight. flight, like I need to protect myself. So you're always being alarmed.

Yeah, exactly. And you hear sirens, the amount of sirens that I remember hearing on the streets. Now, when you hear sirens, sirens have an emotional trigger and they have an emotional response to them. So think about your day. Think about when you come home from work. Well, now you're working from home. What sound do you want to hear when you're working? What sound do you want to hear at the end of the day? When you sound design your life, that's called mindfulness. That's being intentional. And then finally, scent. Scent is such a powerful sense that we're not even aware. How many of you, when you smell your favorite food, can't already wait to eat it? Like, you can almost taste it. Yeah, you can taste it already without just through scent. Why is it that every time you walk into. Yeah, my favorite. Yeah, I think pizza has one of the best scents.

Well, your My wife, Rodney's got some amazing food. That was amazing. When I walked in the kitchen last.

Week, I was like, mmm, this is amazing. That was for you, that was special. That was for you, that was for you. That was a good meal. That was a really good meal. She really appreciated that you love to eat too.

She was happy, her heart was full. Exactly.

Bring a former jock into your house and you'll clear all the food out. She was like, I've never seen someone eat that much. I was like, you know, big American dude. I was like, Lewis is like, you know, he can eat. No, she was so happy that you appreciated it so much. She really appreciated that.

But the scent is important in your life.

When you walk into a massage spa, it's the scent, the eucalyptus, the lavender, the sandalwood, it calls you to a peaceful state. Dude, scent puts you in zen without trying. And so mindfulness is intentionally creating a life that makes you feel what you want to feel, without having to just create the feeling from inside. You may say, Jay, you know, I really struggle trying to be positive. I struggle trying to deal with anxiety. I struggle trying to be focused. Your sight, sense and sounds can help you do that.

Yeah.

And you start creating an environment where you naturally feel that. Like today, when I walked into your studio, I saw your books, I saw these motivational quotes, I saw a boxing glove, and it's like all of a sudden you're like, oh, I'm in a uplifting environment, right? So you already get triggered.

Exactly. Yeah, I think a friend of mine mentioned one time on the podcast, Chris Lee said, you, want to create an environment like a rainforest where things can thrive and grow as opposed to having an environment like a desert where things go to die.

That's beautiful.

And if you have sights, scents, and sounds that are like a desert for your life or your heart, then it's going to be hard to grow those things from your heart. But if you create an environment of a rainforest where things can grow, water, nature, cool air, things like that, then you can really start to cultivate that growth. You mentioned about creating and designing your life. How much of the world do you think we receive by being here? And how much of the world do we create ourselves?

Yeah, that's a beautiful question. It's a complete dynamic dance between what the Vedic tradition would call fate and free will. So fate is what is already created for you. And a good example would be the place you were born, the type of family you grew up in, the socioeconomic background you had. It was already there when you walked in to the world. But within that, you had choices where your free will came about. You had the choice to either do what everyone in your neighborhood did. or to do something different. You had the choice to have a relationship with a particular person or not. So what happens is that we're constantly creating new spaces from which we have another choice.

Right.

And so you kind of see as this dynamic dance between, okay, now I'm in this situation and now what is my choice in this situation? So I would say, I'm not saying it's equal. I'm saying it's a dynamic balance and a switching process where you're constantly creating a new level and then now in that level you have a next choice.

Because we didn't have the choice to be created here. We were here and that wasn't our choice. Now everything after that is our choice, right?

Yeah.

And there are some, obviously there are some traditions and I'm a big diver into like reincarnation and past lives. So according to the beliefs of reincarnation and past lives, you have at some point made a choice to be here. But taking it more simplistically, the truth is that when you're brought into a situation, it's the best analogy that I've heard, and it's been told for years, is of a father is an alcoholic. One of the sons that he has decides to become an alcoholic because his father's an alcoholic. The other son decides to never drink alcohol because his father's an alcoholic. So they were exposed to the same situation and same scenario.

Same environment.

Same environment, but they both made different choices based on their experience. And that's the choice element. That's the element that we should be trying to empower in our lives because we can constantly say, I'm limited by my environment or I've been restricted by my environment. And hey, it's true. There are so many of us that have been limited and restricted, but by now you repeating that, you are going to repeat that restriction in your life.

How much of a positive environment supports us in our growth or holds us back? There are some people who have the perfect family situation, resources, beautiful backyards in nature who are lazy. And there are others who have divorced parents, abusive parents, abusive friends, an environment of a desert. And they figure out a way to thrive.

Totally.

How much importance does our environment play in our overall success?

If you look at the examples that you just shared and you really analyzed life, you'd see very little because you see people craft their own life. So a good example for me is that when I came back from living in the ashram and there were other people who may have been monks who'd also left the path and I came back to a not financially successful or supportive family. So my family doesn't have abundant wealth and couldn't necessarily have taken care of me or paid for me forever. And I had to figure out my own life. And that, to me, was a great sense of impetus and incentive to go and figure it out and learn new skills and network and meet people. And I saw other friends who'd parents had, like, a property portfolio with, like, 10 properties ready to hand them over. They had a BMW the second that they came out, whatever, you know, from their own life.

Yeah.

Or I even have friends that had all of that and didn't become monks and didn't even find careers. So I've also got friends that I went to school with that today don't even have careers, even though their parents were really well established.

Right.

Which has all of these examples have continued me to believe that we truly have influence in our more than our environment. Our environment affects us for sure. It plants seeds and weeds into our life, but there is still a choice. And I think even if you feel there isn't a choice, simply by accepting that there is, it means you have a chance to get out of there. And I think that's what- Because if.

You don't accept that there is, then.

You'Re just gonna stay stuck. Correct. There have been so many times in my life and there's a beautiful quote from Edison. I don't think I said this last time, but if I did, it's worth repeating. He said that, When you believe you've exhausted all options, remember this, you haven't. And the reason why I love that is your mind continuously feels stuck when it's tried the obvious. And that's why a lot of creativity and focus studies say that the first 10 ideas that come to your mind are never the most interesting. It's when you get into the 11th idea that you start breaking the pattern. And so if someone asks you, oh, what's your best business idea? Your first 10 ideas are probably not that innovative. And so the mind constantly gets stuck on that train. And you've got to keep reminding yourself that there is another door, there could be another pathway pathway. I was thinking about a piece of advice that so one of my closest spiritual mentors who was in London, I knew him since I was probably like 12 and properly since I was 18. He passed away this year from stage four brain cancer. And he'd had brain cancer for about, I think like three, three, four years now. And so I hadn't really had a real interaction with him for the past few years because every time I saw him, he wasn't fully functioning in his short-term memory. his long-term memory was there, but his short-term memory wasn't. And I remember speaking to him probably about seven, eight years ago and asking him the question. I said to him, you know, I've got so many ideas. There's so many things I could do. Where do I start?

And.

And he said this beautiful thing to me. He said, you know what? Your role should be to open up every door possible. And he said, let the world close the doors you're not meant to walk through and walk through the ones that remain open. Ooh. And what I realize is most of us are just not opening up enough doors because we think we only have the option of two doors. We look at life as binary, zero and one, zero and one, right?

It's just this or that.

A or B, this or that. And I mean, I think you'd say this too about you and every guest you've ever had on. I don't think life is ever this or that. It's like this, that, and that, and maybe that and that. And there's always a gap.

Of course. The challenge that people have that I've sensed a lot is It's the fear of criticism when you go after something that you weren't supposed to do or that people don't think you're supposed to do. Why do so many people fear criticism from peers, family, friends, the media? Why is that such a big fear? And how do we overcome criticism from others?

Psychologically, we feel a sense of safety and security when we think people agree with us. Right, that is just psychologically true that we would rather avoid conflict and sit in a space where we agree and therefore we have something called confirmation bias and the echo chamber where we keep surrounding ourselves with thoughts and ideas that are similar and reaffirm our beliefs. Now, I think that you can have that and at the same time entertain ideas that you're not sure about yet. and so one of my favorite examples was MIT did this study where they asked people which person was more creative and innovative and they showed two charts. One chart was employee A and the other chart was employee B. The chart for employee A, all of the people they knew knew each other and knew them back. So it was almost like a closed loop. And employee B, they knew lots of people who didn't know each other and they found that people who have more people in their network who don't know each other are more likely to be creative and productive.

Really?

Why is that? Because they expose you to opposing ideas and they may counteract how you think. So one of my favorite examples of this is a conversation between Mark Zuckerberg and one of his mentors. So Mark Zuckerberg told this story at the Facebook headquarters a few years back. I wasn't there. I've seen it on video. I'm sure available. And he talks about how when he was struggling with the direction of Facebook in 2009, he approached his mentor. And his mentor happened to be Steve Jobs. Wow. Pretty cool. Wow.

Pretty cool.

I wish. Really? Yeah, it's so cool, man. And so anyway, so Mark Zuckerberg goes to Steve Jobs and he says, I'm.

Struggling with the direction of Facebook.

Remember at that time Facebook was five years old. There was no fan pages. I don't think. I don't think it was, there was no creators. I don't think there were fan pages. It was very much used by university students at that stage. Like, I think it was mainly like Ivy Leagues and college kids. And I don't even think it was international in a massive way, very early days. And now we can't even think of that. But 2009, I mean, you know, you just about had the iPhone and just about had Instagram and YouTube. So he ran up to Steve Jobs and he said, you know, I'm struggling with the direction of Facebook. What do I do now? Steve Jobs at that time, obviously, was already the founder of one of the biggest brands on the planet, and obviously the brand still is. He had access to investors, he had access to business coaches. I'm sure he had access to life coaches, he had access to health experts.

He had access to anything.

Like, I don't think there was anyone, scientists, PhDs, I don't think there's anyone in the world who Steve Jobs couldn't have called up at the time. And Steve Jobs said something amazing. He said, you know what, Mark? I think you should go and live in an ashram in India. He did not.

He did.

Oh, wait.

He goes.

And when you go to live in the ashram in India, that's where, if you spend some time there, that's where you'll find your answer. Shut up.

And Mark did it.

No way.

Went to the ashram.

It's a true story. For how long? I, I believe he was there for, I believe, I've seen two online. I've seen two versions of the exact time he was there. I've seen some people said it was a couple of days or a week or some people said it's a month. So I think it's, it's hazy how much time he actually spent. But he went and he says that based on that experience, that's where he found the direction of Facebook, to be connecting people. Now, the reason why I love that story is because it's the unobvious, alternative, random connection. And when Harvard did a study of 3,000 executives, they looked at and asked them, what's the number one skill for being a good leader? And a lot of people would say communication, a lot of people would say vision, strategy, humility, and the number one answer that they got from 3, 000 Executives was the one word, which is called associating. And what that means is the ability to spot patterns where everyone else doesn't see them. And that's the connect that real leaders can spot patterns and Connections in anomalies. So most people be like, what is an ashram got to do with a tech platform?

Right.

But that is where you expand your mind to. find answers that you never expected.

How important is creating alone time.

With.

Noises, people, busy work to allow your mind to expand? Is that the only time in that silence? I think you mentioned it. Silence to hear in between the lines.

Yeah.

Is that where we start to hear what we're supposed to be creating, where we're supposed to be heading, our mission?

That's. Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that back. I wanted to get back to that, so. When we talk about, there's a beautiful statement by David Lynch, who's a movie producer and a deep meditator, and he says that prayer is how you talk to God and meditation is how God talks to you. And whether you believe in God or the universe or spirit or divine, whatever it means, the point is that there is a dialogue and a conversation.

So, prayer is like you're speaking, you're saying, Here's what I want.

Here's how I feel.

Help me.

Help me.

And meditation is more receiving.

Receiving, yeah. And so I love that statement because I think it makes it very clear that we have to have a dialogue with the universe, we have to have a dialogue with people in our lives, we have to have a dialogue and there's both giving and receiving. So when I talk about hearing in between the lines, the best example I can give you, Louis, is let's take a look at you and your relationship and mine and my wife's relationship. One of us is always traveling. So you travel, your partner travels, I travel, my wife travels, sometimes we're missing each other. Imagine you've got really busy and hectic. Do you think, and anyone listening or watching, you can ask the same question, if you were really busy and hectic and stressed out, do you think your partner feels comfortable to tell you how they feel and get your attention?

If I'm busy, stressed out, overwhelmed, will my partner tell me how I feel about themselves or about- yeah, do you.

Think they would feel confident and to be like, Louis, I need to tell you something really important.

I don't think they would.

They wouldn't. They really wouldn't because...

They don't want to stress you out more. They don't want to stress you out more.

They're not present, all these things. Exactly. So exactly that. And so what happens is when you're still, your mind and body actually get to speak to you and give you signals of how they feel. And so when you're still, that's when you notice that ache in your foot that you haven't noticed for a month. Sometimes when you slow down, that's when you get sick. because your body wasn't allowing itself to be sick because you were pushing it to get through stuff. And so just like your partners can't communicate with you until you slow down, your body and mind can't communicate with you until you still. And so there's a beautiful Buddhist teaching that says what movement does for the body, stillness does for the mind. And so when we find that space, stillness and solitude, you really are able to hear your deepest desires and challenges, your physical pains and areas of growth. It's one of the reasons why when people meditate, they feel sleepy afterwards and they think they're doing it wrong. But actually they're doing it right. Meditation just told you you needed more sleep. You needed rest. Yeah, meditation was just a signal. So sometimes when I meditate with people that I'm coaching, they're like, pass that on. Some of them will be like, oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry Jay, I'm just feeling so tired. And I'm like, no, no, then sleep, then rest. Yeah, that's what your body's telling you because you finally listened. And some people are like, oh Jay, I feel so energized. And I'm like, yeah, because you allowed yourself to be in line with your.

Body and now your body's saying that you feel energized. And that's great, you've got that energy. Go work out, go build something. Or you've cleared out those negative thoughts.

Or you've let go of those distractions or that resentment. And so you're not feeling this weight so you feel lighter. Correct. Stillness and silence is one of my favorite ways for you to actually build that relationship with hearing your inner voice.

Is there too much silence? Like if you say, okay, five hours a day, is there a tipping point when you're like, okay, I think you do two hours every morning, but a lot of people say, well, I've only got 20 minutes maybe. Is five hours too much? Is an hour, you know, what is the maximum or minimum, the sweet spot you think for people to be silent every day, to live a great life?

I think 20 minutes is a great starting point. Because 20 minutes is significant enough time for your mind to switch off. So we hear that studies show that we have 60 to 80,000 thoughts a day and a lot of them are negative. 80% are negative. I'm guessing a lot of them are repeated. And so if you're only going to say I'm going to do five minutes, it just takes five minutes to switch off. It takes five minutes to just overcome that noise. and so I'd say that 20 minutes is a good amount of time and hey you're not trying and I think this is the challenge with meditation mindfulness, you're not trying to empty your mind, you're just trying to be present with it.

How much of the actions and being in integrity with our word to ourselves is necessary as well?

So you're starting from I'm lovable and I'm gonna go on dates and I want this person to say I'm lovable but if you're eating burgers and fries and staying up all night and turning up with chipped nail varnish and dirty hair and a stained t-shirt. You're not really saying I'm lovable. You're not really saying I'm a catch. You know, if some guy turned up with a beer all over his t-shirt and an egg in his beard, you wouldn't think, oh, he's a catch. Any more than a guy who would think you've turned up in dirty old leggings with chipped nail varnish. So when it again, that's abusive behavior. If you want someone to believe you're lovable, you have to believe you're lovable. First you believe it, then you start to act in a way that says, yeah, if I'm lovable, I should take myself to bed now. I don't really need to watch any more episodes of Catherine the Great tonight. I can do it over the weekend. I don't need eight slices of pizza. I can have one. So it goes back into the message you're sending out when you know your lover, when you resonate you act in a different way. You're not a people pleaser. You help, you're nice. You wouldn't go, well, I have what you're having. I do what you want. I don't care. I'll go wherever you want to go. You have an opinion and you'll say, oh, no, that's not my thing. I don't really like that. I don't want to do that. I'm not going to drive for three hours to see you. If you're not prepared to meet me halfway, then it's not a good place to start. If I've got to pay the bill all the time, time. If you never, if you never ask me how is the conversation going back and forth? Is someone listening to you? Are they transmitting or receiving? Some people just transmit. They go like a hairdryer, they go, and the whole day is them talking to you and they never ask you how you are. And that's not respectful. Respectful is saying, oh, did you, you keep interrupting me, you're not asking me anything about me. I've been on a date, there's only one thing about me, and I realized I don't need to put myself through that. And if you have enough respect, you'll say, you know, we've been talking for an hour, this is actually not a match. I wish you great success in finding love, but you're not for me and I'm not for you. And you have that sense of rather than dragging out another six hours.

Just about being nice.

I deserve better. And, you know, again, it comes back to your needs. And in the beginning, when all my clients have what I call unmet needs, needs. They come in like I wasn't loved, I wasn't nurtured, I wasn't praised, I wasn't supported, I didn't feel safe. And when a child has an unmet need and a baby's need is very simple. Children need to feel safe, secure, loved, connected, significant. And as we get, well we need all of those. We also need you to feel proud of us and we need to feel interesting and worthy. And if our needs aren't met at an early age, We give up the need or we give it away. And you see that in relationships so much. I've given up the need that you care about me, but I'll care about you. Or I'm giving it away. It's your job now. You're gonna have to make me feel attractive, interesting, sexy, worth being with. So I'm giving my need to you.

A lot of work.

Yeah, a huge work because now you're still needy, but someone else's job is to meet your needs and they can do it very well for a while but then they get bored, they have their own needs. So if you give the need up, no one's going to love me. I expect all relationships if I always get ghosted. I've now given the need up. I've got my cats, I've got my Ben and Jerry's in the freezer, my Netflix and I'm just not going to even bother. I'm going to, I just know it's not going to work. I've even stopped dating. So I've given the need up. I might, I've even given the need up to have a great job and I'm living a life that's not very satisfying but I've given the need up. Or I've given it away, someone out there is going to have to turn up and meet my need. I need to feel the same thing, significant, connected, loved, safe. You've got to do that for me. But there's a third way which is meet the need yourself. As weird as that sounds. If I need to feel safe, my husband's out and I go, hey, how can I feel safe you've left town. I lock the doors, have a little alarm thing that I never use but when he's out of town I know where it is in the bedroom. One of my clients said, when my husband goes away I have to go and stay with my mother of 85 to feel safe. I'm like, what's she going to do? She's 85 years old. How can that be that you've given your need to be safe to someone of 85? Every time your husband leaves town you take your kids to your 85 year old mother. so she's given the need away. But the idea is, okay, I got a phone, I got an alarm, I got a great system, I know, all just to believe you're safe. So if you look right now at your unmet needs, they're always going to be the same connected, safe, secure, significant, valid, worthwhile. You need someone to be proud of me. I need to feel I matter. And it may sound kind of weird to go, okay, I'm going to do it. I matter. I'm significant. I'm secure within myself. I'm proud of who I am. If you decide to meet your unmet needs, you feel so complete that then you'll meet other people who can also meet them. But it's the opposite of needy. And that's if I'm in a relationship, like, okay, I've got a list here and someone's gonna have to tick all these boxes. And the second thing with needs is when you find someone to have a relationship with, you've got to put your needs into three piles. So I'm gonna use all these cups.

Yes.

So you have to say, okay, this need is non-negotiable you're gonna have to meet that need. I need to always know where you are at 2 in the morning. I need to know where you are. I need you to call me. I need you to be home in time for dinner. I need you to put your underpants in the laundry basket. That is a need I'm not prepared to sacrifice. That's okay. But then you might go, you know what? I can put the underpants in the laundry basket. Is it really worth worth all the arguments. So the second thing, you know what? I can meet this need. I need a clean, tidy house. My husband doesn't even see mess, but I'm just going to do it myself. Or maybe we can get someone to come in. But the second need, you meet it. And the third need, just give it up. It's sometimes it's just not worth it. See if I said, I need my husband to make a huge deal about my birthday, hey this is a need, birthdays are huge, I want a gift, I want it wrapped, I want ribbons, I can say, meet that, I can say, you know what, I can find myself a great gift. I can do that myself if it's not that important. Or I can go, is it really important? I've got every, do I need all these gifts actually? It doesn't matter which one it is, but no one can meet all your needs. You've got to have that need is non-negotiable. That need, I can meet it, and that need, I'm going to give it up. So my daughter is an artist and I realized immediately the need for tidiness, there's just no way. Because people who are messy don't see mess. They can't meet you go, oh yes, I'm so sorry, they don't see it. So I couldn't say to her, hey, you need a tidy room all the time. I could go in and tidy her room every single day, but you know what? I just learned to shut the door. I gave up that need and it made our family so much happier because she lives in chaos and I don't, and she's a pain Mm-. And one day I went and I stapled plastic all over her walls and her carpet, and that was great. I never worried about it again.

Part of what keeps us stuck is that we think, oh, I'm wired this way, or I have to rewire, and it's too on/off rather than flows, right? It's not freeway from A to B. It's the way you see a school of birds flow.

Uh-huh.

They roll over each other, Aurora Borealis.