"DO THIS To Become Emotionally Stable!" | Sadhguru & Lewis Howes

You are creating anger, you are creating misery. All this is happening from within you. Because the moment your thoughts and emotions are going to torment you with external stimulant, when you're free from the fear of suffering, that is when you.

When we have emotions, thoughts or feelings, emotions of anger, resentment from something that happened in the past, upset that we see on social media, frustrations in the world, where should we be redirecting these thoughts, feelings and emotions?

You must punch a window pane or a wall. Better. A stone wall is good.

You'll feel it more. Yeah, exactly.

Because that is the model that the Hollywood and the television shows, everything is setting up. When you get angry, you break something. All right, Exactly. So, see, first of all, people are assuming that anger is happening to them or misery is happening to them. No, this is exactly what I said earlier. Maybe I didn't articulate it fully. No, you are creating anger, you are creating misery, you are creating joy, you are creating whatever. All this is happening from within you. Is it true all human experience is happening from within us?

It's, it's. Yeah, because we perceive something and then we.

Something else, something else may stimulate. But human experience is happening from within us, isn't it? Whether it's love or hate or anger or misery or joy or anything is only happening from within us. The simple question I am asking is what happens from within you? Should you. Should it happen your way or somebody else's way?

It should happen your way, of course.

Because the world will never happen your way. Hundred percent. Because there are so many stakeholders in the world, little bit will happen my way. Little bit your way, that is fine. But what happens within me must happen my way. If what happens within me does not happen my way, this is the worst form of slavery, isn't it?

Wow.

Somebody decides what happens within me. Somebody decides where I should sit. This is slavery. Everybody understands this now. Somebody decides whether I am happy or unhappy. Isn't this the worst form of slavery?

Yeah.

So this is the liberation that humanity needs to work at. This is what inner engineering means. Inner engineering is not some mechanical process because engineering means this. Essentially, you will say something is well engineered only if it works the way you want, isn't it? If this one doesn't work the way you want. When you live accidentally, anxiety is normal.

Yes, it's every day. But when you're living on purpose and intentionally and mindfully, you should be able to shift out of that.

No, no, no, no. I wouldn't use those words.

Okay, what words would you use.

When you say Purpose, intention, mindful. See, this is the whole problem with people. Their mind is full all the time.

Right?

My mind is just empty all the time. Nothing happening. Nothing. That's why I wear a turban, just to make it substantial. There's nothing in my head. If I'm walking there, I'm just walking. Nothing happens. Because, see, right now, your hands are there. Suppose your one hand starts jumping like this. Let's say my hand starts jumping like this. What will you think? You think Sadhguru has some kind of a. Isn't it?

I just. That's the. That's the way intelligent people do things, you know?

No, no. Suppose my hand starts jumping like that. You will think there is some ailment, isn't it? You will think I am. Maybe Mr. Parkinson's is visiting me or something like that.

Sure.

So your mind is jumping all the. All over the place. Why is that not ailment? I'm asking. Your only comfort is other people cannot see it, isn't it?

Yeah, I guess they see it through the manifestation of you being anxious or tense or stressed or angry or.

No, whether they see it or not, they see it or not. If any part of you is simply jumping without purpose, is that an ailment? I am asking.

If any part of you is jumping without purpose, is it an ailment? Well, I think in your inner engineering course, you talk about how we have certain faculties that we can't control, like going to the bathroom and doing certain things that are part of our body. So.

Yeah, but I don't know if that's.

A trick question or not, but.

No, no, the pee. The pee is just filling up in the bladder. It's not jumping all over the place.

Gotcha. Gotcha.

If it jumps all over the place, that is an ailment.

That's an ailment. Yes. Correct.

Right. Now suppose. Let me take a worse example. Suppose your hand starts beating you in the face.

That's an ailment.

Yes, for sure. So right now, your thoughts and emotions are beating you up from inside. Why is that not an ailment? I am saying.

No, it is.

So let us not think. Anger happens to us. Resentment happens to us. No. These things we are creating, we have the power to emote. We can make it love. We can make it joy, we can make it ecstasy. But people have chosen to make it tension, anger, resentment, hatred. They have turned it that way. Now they will claim this is because life has been unfair to me. Life has not been fair to anybody, especially not me. Life is not Fair to anybody. Life is simply rolling. It's for you to learn to ride it. Sometimes we are in uncomfortable situations. Some. Sometimes we are in comfortable situations. Sometimes we are in situations where we know exactly what to do in. Sometimes we are in situations where we don't know what to do. Sometimes somebody else is controlling the situation. Sometimes you are controlling the situation. This is how life is. If you are constantly stepping into unfamiliar situations in your life, that means you are growing at a rapid pace. If you are in constantly in comfortable situations, that means you are a stagnant life. So if you. If you look for comfort, if you look for a comfort zone, because the moment your thoughts and emotions are going to torment you with external, stimulant, external stimulation, that happens, what will you choose? You will choose a comfort zone. This means you will limit your life. So the moment somebody can cause you pain or suffering, this means, unknowingly, you will make the very scope of your life very limited. Only when a person loses this fear of suffering, that no matter what happens, this is how I will be. If this assurance comes to you, then you walk full stride. Because whatever happens in the life around you, it will not really make you suffer. Once you are free from suffering, only when you are free from suffering. When you are free from the fear of suffering, that is when you will explore your life in full depth and dimension.

How do we rid ourselves of the fear of suffering then?

See, as I told you, the suffering is happening because your faculties are not held in your hands. If I have to go to this in little detail, I will have to take a few minutes. See, for example, if I ask you a simple question, do you want your intellect to be sharp or blunt? What is your choice?

Sharp.

Sharp, of course, so you understand your intellect is the better, the sharper it is, the better it is. It's like a knife. So if it's like a knife, it's a cutting instrument. So if you give anything to your intellect, it will dissect everything. And see, this is the nature of our intellect. You don't have to physically dissect, but it dissects everything and sees. What is this? What is that? This is the nature of the intellect. Without dissection, it doesn't know because it is a knife. It's like a scalpel. It must be sharp. A knife that is not sharp is no good knife, isn't it?

Right.

So good for.

Good for butter.

Yeah, that also depends. It just comes out of the refrigerator. Even that it won't cut. So if, if you're Using a knife to do everything. To do everything. Let's say you eat with a knife, you brush with your knife, and you do everything with your knife. Of course you will be bleeding. That's all that's happening. Only one dimension of intelligence within us. In yogic way of looking at things, we look at mind as 16 parts. This intellect is just one part. Because our education systems are such, which are totally intellect oriented, human beings largely are using only one dimension of their intellect to do everything. You use a knife to stitch your clothes, what will you wear? Only tatters. See, that's what you're seeing in Los Angeles right now. Half the people are wearing tattered clothes. Maybe they used a knife to stitch their jeans.

Exactly. With holes in it. Yes.

So if you use a knife to stitch, that's what will happen. All tatters. Right now. Human life is in tatters mainly because of this. Instead of using a needle, you're using a knife. So intellect is a very good instrument of survival. If you want to survive on this planet, you need a sharp intellect. The sharper it is, the better you will survive. But that will not make life. That will not put everything together right now. Because through intellectual process, people are trying to handle everything with so much care. They are trying to do everything right, right, right, right. And a blunder. The result is a blunder. Everything right. But the end result is a big blunder because you're using a knife to do everything.

When. Okay, here's a. Here's a question for you. When you. When was the last time that you felt anger or resentment and actually expressed it?

I was just thinking of getting angry with you just now. Perfect.

Bring it. I love that.

See.

The thing is, Louis, I. I did not give this privilege to anybody. That somebody can make me happy, somebody can make me unhappy, somebody can make me angry, somebody can make me miserable. I have not given that privilege to anybody. It's not that I'm incapable of all these things. If I want, I can be all those things, but I have not given this privilege to anybody. They can't do something to me and make me angry. No, I have not given that privilege to anyone.

Did you have that experience or give that privilege to someone when you were younger? Did you learn that at a certain point where you transitioned?

Till. Till I was 23, 24 years of age? From the age of probably 11, 12, I was always 24 hours angry.

Really?

Most, yes, because I was. I was on this binge of what is justice and injustice. So once you start looking what is justice and Injustice. Just about everything in the world looks unjust.

Everything makes you angry.

Small things. Yeah, yeah, everything. Anything unjust means it makes me angry. And everywhere I see, whether at home, in school, on the street, in the society, in the country, in the world, wherever I see, I think this is unjust. This is unjust. This is unjust. So much injustice. Always angry.

Right? I mean, I feel like there's a lot. There's a lot of people in America and in the world who a lot of things make them angry. And there's a lot of injustice for people. So when did you shift and how did you come to that realization that this no longer works for you in your life?

See, it doesn't work for anybody.

That's true.

Not just for me.

For you personally.

When did you realize, see the reason why people think anger is some kind of a virtue. Because they say righteous anger, all right, Right now, America is sheathing with anger, and they think it's righteous anger. This is simply because it takes some horrible thing to stimulate them into action. There's not enough love in your heart to stimulate yourself into action. Something has to poke you. You must get angry, and then it propels you into action. So that kind of action sometimes will produce results, of course. But if you want genuine results which will be good for everybody, we must do it when everything is right. But when everything is little, comfortable, nobody does anything. When something horrible happens, then we will get angry and propel ourselves into action. Right. Now, this propelling yourself into action with anger, how long will you keep it up? You cannot keep it up forever.

Yeah. You get tired.

Yes. If you keep it up forever, you will destroy yourself and you will destroy everything around yourself. So anger is. Become valuable because most people are so lethargic in their responses once, in a way, when they get angry, they feel empowered and seem to be doing right things. Once in a way, you must be doing those right things all your life. Then by the end of your life, everything might not have changed, but you would have made a difference. That's the way the world works.

So how I. Man. So if people are lethargic and comfortable a lot of the times and they're unwilling to choose love and act with love to make a change, how do we get people to wake up when things are calmer so that they can act with love and get the change and the results they want?

See, today, this whole movement, what you're seeing as inner engineering is a movement from religion to responsibility. In a way, essentially, what I mean is religion means people are thinking Responsibility is somewhere up there. Where is that up? Nobody knows. All right? You just have to believe. Where is that up? But now you are sitting in California, I am here in Tamil Nadu. If I look up, I am looking at looking up in one direction. If you look up, you are looking up in another direction. So my up is different, your up is different. And by tomorrow morning again, my up will be yours, your up will be mine. It will be big confusion. The damn planet is spinning and it's round. Which way is up? Does anybody know which way is up in this universe? Is it marked somewhere in the cosmos? This side up? There is no such thing. So responsibility is up there. No, no, no. It must come here. We must understand if we want to live in a wonderful world. It's only us and us and us who can make this happen. No other force from anywhere is going to make this happen. Unless we realize on transform ourselves from religion to responsibility that it's here. What this whole thing has come up is, see, because we have no explanation for creation. Before you and me came, so much creation has happened. Who did it? A simplistic, childish understanding of this is a big man must have done it. So he is somewhere up there. Because you can't see him here. He must be up there. Now, of course, women are claiming, why not it be a woman in India? We sorted these problems out. There are we have man gods, we have woman gods, we have snake God, we have cow God, we have elephant God, we have every kind, crawling ones, creeping ones, flying ones. Because we foresaw all the future problems that may happen. You don't know who will claim what tomorrow. So we said everything is God. So what I am saying is our idea of God has essentially come because we have no explanation for creation. How did all this happen? Such a complex, fantastic stuff. Who did it? Because we are human, we think it must be a big human being. Suppose you and me were buffaloes having conversation right now. We would definitely think God is a huge buffalo, isn't it? Nobody could argue with us about that. We would definitely say he's a huge buffalo because that would be our imagination right now. This is our imagination. It's fine if you are using it to settle a few things. If you are using it as a way of a psychological process, fine. But solace is one thing. Solutions for life is a different thing. So one first thing that we must decide is those who are in extreme states of poverty, war, other kinds of misery imposed upon them, only for them you must give solace. Rest of us who have eaten our breakfast today morning or dinner. We should talk about solution, not solace. Solace is just a psychological process to settle something within you. But why people who have eaten well, people who are healthy, people who have a life to live, why are they psychological problems? They should not have any psychological problems. That's all I'm saying. I know this will be very cruel for lot of people, but they better get it because life is brief. If they don't get it now and they think being psychologically disturbed is normal, they will spend their life like this. It is not normal. To be healthy is normal. To be balanced is normal. To be joyful is normal. Look at yourself when you are five years of age, were you miserable or joyful? And somebody had to make you take the joy out of you by poking you with something. Otherwise joy wouldn't go. You would be bouncing all over the place. Isn't it today somebody has to make you happy. Somebody has to work hard to make you happy. At that time. Somebody had to work hard to make you miserable. Today, somebody has to make you work hard to make you happy. The whole equation has gotten reversed. What is it? What is it that happened to you? You just grew up.

It sounds to me and it looks to me like when I'm connecting with people, people that a lot of things from the past, past memories, past pains, hurts, traumas are being brought to the forefront for a lot of people with the chaos of the now. How do we start to heal the memories of the past, the traumas of the past, so that they don't keep hurting us in the present?

Well, the first thing I would say is, you know, sometimes there's a crisis and well meaning mental health professionals rush in to discuss the trauma while it's still happening. That's a really bad idea. People are generally traumatized because something actually horrible happened and dwelling on it in the moment just makes it worse. It's not like anybody has a solution. Here's how you should understand this. You know, someone's just shot up your kid's school. Here's how you should understand this. That'll make it all better. It's like, no, it won't. If you have old baggage, that often comes up if you're having an argument with someone, doesn't it, you know how it, you know how it is. This is partly why people don't like to have a dispute within a relationship. Because it's a thread and you pull on that thread and just God, oh that. We had another rule. Do not agree with something you don't agree with.

Ooh.

Like, if we're gonna. If we decide, you and me, that we're doing this, we don't go back and say, well, I didn't really mean it. We don't get to play revisionist with our history. So if you. If you don't agree, don't agree. Fight, object, or hold your peace. Because, you see, what happens with couples is there's a little fight, and then one says the other, yeah, but you did this. And then that person says, yeah, I know I did that, but then that was because you did this. And each this gets bigger until what's on the table is, why the hell should we stay together at all?

Right?

And so every fight becomes why the hell should we stay together at all? So that's another thing you want to do is you want to have the fight about this thing.

Not about everything past.

Not everything. It's like, okay, you were flirting. I think you were flirting more than you should have been. Okay, So I go away and I think, well, okay, maybe I was. Okay, well, then we have to have a discussion about why, and maybe we can solve that. But mostly what we have to do is figure out how to not have that happen again. Okay, so we're gonna go see the same couple again. What is it that you want me to do? So I'm the flirtatious one, let's say, what do you want me to do? Well, you have to figure that out. It's like, no, I'm stupid like you. We're equally stupid. I need to know what would satisfy you, and you need to figure out what would satisfy you. So I know. And that, like, that's also extremely useful is let your can establish your conditions of satisfaction, make them explicit, let the other person know.

Yeah, you can't read someone's mind.

Yeah, we're very bad at that. We're bad at reading our own minds, for that matter.

Yeah.

So if we. If I have a fight with. With Tammy, let's say sometimes I remember to say, okay, what. What do you want me to do right now? What can I do? What. What should I say and mean? You know, and you think, well, you shouldn't let the other person put words in your mouth. Well, fair enough. You know, I'm not act. I'm not asking for something false. I'm saying I'd like to not have this happen. Can you see a way out? Is there something I could do to increase the probability that that's the route we could take? And, you know, sometimes that works. But the other person has to let you know what they would find satisfying.

You mentioned, you mentioned sexual shame, and it triggered something in me about just the shames of the past that people tend to hold on to. I think I might have mentioned this to the last time we talked. I'm not sure if you know, but I was. I was sexually abused when I was 5 by a man that I didn't know. And for 25 years, I held on to the secret, the shame. And if anyone ever knew about this, then I would never be loved. I. You know.

Right, because you feel contaminated permanently.

Yeah, I would, you know, I wouldn't have any guy friends. No girls would find me attractive. My parents would disown me. You know, I went down the rabbit hole of these stories of, you know, I'm the only one this has ever happened to. I never saw any examples of this happening to.

Right.

And about eight years ago, I started to really heal that and start sharing that shame and many different therapeutic experiences that allowed me to start the healing process. I'm curious, from your perspective, with all the work that you've done, what is the best approach for someone to really heal their shame? Whether it's around sexual abuse or trauma or just anything, whether it be small or big or any type of shame that they might have. How does someone release shame in a healthy manner so that it doesn't make them a prisoner of these emotions of the past that hold them back?

Well, you hinted at a few things when you just described what. What happened to you is. You said, well, first of all, you know, I thought I was the only person this had ever happened to. It's like, no, it's a universal human experience to one degree or another. Now, you know, I'm not saying everyone was sexually abused, and I'm certainly not saying that some people aren't sexually abused to a degree that's so extreme it's unimaginable. Where there are others, you know, get off relatively lightly. But it's still, it's. It's well within the realm of normative human experience that sexual, that sex goes wrong in some way, at least you regret something that's happened, something you've done or something that was done to you. So putting it in to when, when you're the only person that something has happened to, that's really not good. Right. Because it alienates you even from yourself. You have no idea what to do with that. And so that's sometimes why people find it such a relief to have their illness diagnosed. It's like, oh, there is, this is known, there's a category. Other people have had this experience. Maybe there's a pathway through it. So just knowing that you're not the only person like that can be very helpful updating. It's like how you were how old?

Five.

Okay, well one thing to realize when you're 25 and you were abused when you're five is that you're not five anymore. Right, right. That the person to whom that happened is no longer there. You're there. But so you know, you might feel afraid of relationships, you might feel afraid of all sorts of things, but a lot of that was you're sort of feeling that, like that residual five year old. I tell a story about one client I had. She was abused by her older brother. And she told me this story and I drew a picture in my head while she was, you know, I kind of pictured her of at 5 and this teenage hulking teenager, you know, taking advantage of her. But as she told the story, I realized that her older brother was only a year two years older than her. While he was seven was like, okay, well they were, she wasn't the victim of a tyrannical male in some sense. She, they were two badly supervised children. Now that doesn't mean that what he did was right, but she was still the five year old in the memory. But she was 27 or so when she came to see me. And so the first thing I did was just point that out. It's like think about the seven year olds you know, right. From for a five year old, a seven year old is an adult. But for an adult, a seven and a five year old are clearly both children. Well, that just changed things somewhat. It made her feel less vulnerable in the moment. What your brain wants from you in relationship to a traumatic memory is indication that you're no longer vulnerable to the same problem. That's what memory is for, right? You remember something bad and you process it so that you change your interpretation or your behavior or the situation or whatever you can change so that it isn't going to happen in the future. And that'll, if you do that thoroughly, you'll generally let yourself rest.

You have the memory to protect yourself from it happening again.

Well, that's the purpose of memory in general. You make sense of your past behavior so that the good things that happen to you can be duplicated and the bad things can be avoided. It's not to make an objective record of the world, it's to make a functional map of the world that you can apply to the future. And so.

So how. Yeah, how do we let that go? How do we disassociate something that happened a year ago, 10, 20 years ago, that is no longer happening, but it seems to be triggering us.

Oh, it's very. It's very difficult. Well, I would say, you know, one of the things you need to develop, if you've had an experience like the one you had, perhaps because I don't know the details, you probably need a theory of malevolence. You need an explanation. It's like, how could a person do that? Well, you have to have an.

What if the explanation isn't good, they were just bad person? They just.

Well, then you need a philosophy of bad. You need a philosophy of evil. You have to understand it so that you're no longer a victim of it. You have. Because otherwise you can't put the event in a context.

Right.

You know, and sometimes that means the development of real. A real philosophical sophistication. And that can help because then, you know, then you can start to separate out malevolence from benevolence because maybe you're afraid of any intimate relationship now because it's been contaminated with that and everything's fuzzy and foggy. And so you need to understand the person who did that, at least to some degree, so that you can separate that person out from all the other people around you who. That you encounter in situations that might be reminiscent of it. You know, so you. You felt vulnerable for perhaps you felt ashamed. All those things have to be gone through. What do you think, you know, when you're ashamed? When does. What elicits that? What are the eliciting cues? What do you think when that happens? All of that has to be taken apart. I said in this Beyond Order book that, you know, if you have a memory older than about 18 months, that still bothers you, right? It's still got emotional resonance.

Write it out older than 18 months ago or.

Yeah, no, older than 18 months ago or more. Otherwise, it's not really in the past. Right. It's still happening. That whether you should delve into something, how you should delve into something traumatic that's currently happening is a whole different issue. But if it's an old memory and it still bothers you, it means that you haven't decomposed that experience sufficiently to detach it from the emotion. So imagine when something terrible happens to you, you don't understand it. So then you might say, well, if you don't understand something that's happening to you, how can it be terrible? Because doesn't terrible mean that you understand it? And the answer is. Well, you understand things in stages. And the first way you understand a terrible thing is by freezing in terror or running. That's the understanding. It's not conceptual. It's embodied and emotional. And so event terror, that's the first category. Okay, now the next question is, how do you get it out? How do you get out of the terror? Well, you realize that nothing truly dangerous is happening. Well, what if something truly dangerous did happen? Then you elaborate your view of the world to the point where you're no longer vulnerable to that terrible thing. That's extremely difficult. So the memory of something terrible stays terrible until you effortfully process it and decompose it into. Well, often into a much more sophisticated map of the world. And it's really hard to do that.

I couldn't get my mind to do what I wanted to do. And then after six weeks, I just went through the whole thing. I felt like I hit a golf ball right in the sweet spot. Something clicked. And from that point forward, what took me two and a half or three hours to do, I was able to do in 45 minutes. I was firing and wiring these new circuits. And I was practicing paying attention. And then all of a sudden, I started noticing dramatic changes in my health like this. The moment I started noticing changes in my body, what was going on outside of me, I started correlating at what I was doing inside of me. Now I was just hooked. And I just started doing it with more passion and more sincerity. Anyway, back on my feet in 10 and a half weeks back training at 12 weeks back in my clinic. And I just made a deal with myself that if I was ever able to walk again, I'd spend the rest of my life studying the mind, body connection and mind over matter. And then that led me to just stop everything in my life. I just wasn't the same guy. I'd just been initiated into something and sold my practice, sold my home.

You sold it all?

Sold it all. Moved to the Northwest and just started asking bigger questions, like, who am I? Why am I here? What are we doing? What happens when we die? How did all this happen for me? What was the process? I started studying the science behind it. And I couldn't find it in any conventional textbooks. Because this was unconventional. And miraculous is kind of unconventional. So I started studying quantum physics and neuroscience and epigenetics. And it started making sense. I started building this model of understanding. Then I asked the fundamental question. Has anybody else Done it. So then I traveled to 17 different countries and interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people with serious health conditions that were treating either conventionally or unconventionally. They were staying the same or getting worse. And all of a sudden I got better. So what was the cause that produced the effect? You know, and the stories. And what I learned was so amazing. I went back to school and studied neuroscience because mind was such a strong element. It wasn't diet, it wasn't celibacy, it wasn't any of those things. It was just really this element. And so then I was able to figure out that there were four common things. And then I wrote a book about it. And then I thought, God, if this works really on people that were sick and are better, and they come from all walks of life, all colors, all races, all genders, sexual preferences. But all of a sudden I wanted to see if I was able to reproduce it. So then I started seeing, okay, let's see if we can teach this, be able to reproduce the outcome, because that's science, right? So we went through about what were.

The four common things?

The first one was that they all believed and accepted that there was an intelligence that lived within them, that was giving them life.

These people you interviewed who had had injuries that overcame.

No, no, these are people with cancer, Ms. lupus, Parkinson's disease, who got better. Yeah, just spontaneously. It's called a spontaneous phenomenon. So I was.

They believed there was an intelligence, there.

Was some invisible life force that was, they were connected to that they felt like they had lost their connection to. They became separate and disconnected from. And that when they got the diagnosis, they woke up and said, man, I gotta connect again and I gotta connect to my essence. And so they developed a relationship with it just like you develop a relationship with anybody. It takes time. You got to be present, you got to connect, you got to experience, you got to be present. All of these things are important elements. So that was the first thing. The second thing was that they realized that it was the mismanagement of their emotions and the hormones of stress that really began to create their condition. Now, stress is when your brain and body, body are knocked out of balance. Stress is when your body's knocked out of homeostasis. We have an innate mechanism in our body that returns us back to order. So then if someone cuts you off on the LA freeway, you have an emotional reaction, but 15 minutes later you're back to driving and you're over it. Right? That's all organisms in nature can tolerate short term stress.

When it's all day long, all week, all year.

So if you're reacting to like a tyrannosaurus revolution is chasing you, you have to make a decision, am I going to use 20% of my energy? I'm going to use 100%. So it turns out when you're reacting to traffic 200%, right? Or if you're reacting to your co worker sitting in the cubicle next to you, you're turning on that response. And what was once very adaptive becomes very maladaptive. Because when you turn on the stress response and you can't turn it off now, you're headed for disease because nobody can live in emergency mode for that extended period of time. Well, human beings, we can turn on the stress response just by thought alone. You can think about your problems and you're producing the same biological effects. So those chemicals give the brain and body a rush of energy, and people become addicted to that rush of energy. So now they use the problems and conditions in their life to reaffirm their addiction to that emotion. They need the bad job, they need the poor relationship. So that means they become addicted to the life that they don't even like.

Why do we need the bad job or bad relationship and stay stuck?

Because it's a conditioned response. So listen, if you get angry at a co worker and all of a sudden you get an arousal in your brain and body, right? You get a rush of energy. When you start noticing that your body starts dropping, your brain starts noticing, your energy starts dropping, you're automatically going to have the image of the co worker in order to what, give your body the next jolt, right? So all of a sudden people become addicted to their own thoughts, right? So these people realize that, oh my God, I've been mismanaging my attention and energy and I got to get beyond my past. I got to get beyond these emotions. I got to make some big changes. I got to break the habit of being myself. You know, I got to stop being this person. Now that sounds really good, theoretically and philosophically. But change is such a hard thing, right? Because the moment you come back to your senses and you step back into your life and you see that person or you go to that place or you're with that experience. So many people are unconsciously reacting in their thoughts and feelings to everything in their environment. So now their environment is controlling how they think and feel. So they realize that in order to change the environment, they got to be greater than their environment, greater than the conditions in the world, greater than the circumstances.

Be mindful of that every Time it goes up to be like, okay, I'm going to think differently. I'm not going to react differently.

Yeah, right. I'm not going to go back. I'm not going to go back. Because the moment you start reacting emotionally, emotions are a record of the past. And if those emotions are driving your thoughts, you're thinking in the past. And if you can't think greater than how you feel and you believe your thoughts have something to do with, with your destiny, you're creating more of your past. Right. So it turns out that the repetition of thinking and feeling and feeling and thinking, these loops that people get caught in condition their body to subconsciously become the mind of that emotion. Which means now their body, as their own conscious mind, is believing they're living in the Same past experience 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. What's the relevance behind that? Well, the latest research on genes says genes don't create disease. It's the environment that signals the gene that creates disease.

The emotional environment or the physical environment.

Your environment, any environmental reaction. But if you're reacting emotionally to your environment the same way, you're signaling the same gene in the same way. And now you're headed for a genetic destiny. So the hormones of stress push the genetic buttons that create disease. If you can turn on the stress response just by thought alone, your thoughts could make you sick. And if your thoughts can make you sick, is it possible that your thoughts can make you well? So they began to realize that, oh my God, the repetition of thinking and feeling and feeling and thinking caused me to feel guilt. And I don't even know it's guilt. It just feels like me. It's just I'm used to the same chemical continuity now. The moment they decided to change. Anytime you decide to change and change anything about yourself, get ready, because it's going to feel uncomfortable. You're going to leave the known, you're going to leave the familiar, and you're going to step into the unknown.

Even if the familiar is uncomfortable and painful, it's still going to be painful, leaving the pain, right?

Because some people are super happy being unhappy. So then they would rather cling to their suffering than take a chance and possibilities. So these people said, I really have nothing to lose, right? So then they said, I'm willing to be uncomfortable and be in the unknown. And. And it turns out that's the perfect place to create from. So when the body is conditioned to become the mind, then to change is to be greater than the body. Right.

Because we become greater than the body.

Well, that's a whole nother conversation, but let me finish this. Okay? So the third thing they said was, okay, so now that I know that I got to break the habit of being myself. And I can't mismanage my thoughts and feelings. I got to change how I act. I got to watch how I speak. I gotta become conscious of how unconscious I am. Because 95% of who we are by the time we're 35 years old is a set of memorized behaviors, like a computer program. Emotional reactions, unconscious beliefs and perceptions. So the first step to change is to become conscious of how you think, to notice how you act, to pay attention to how you feel. And the act of observing those states of mind and body separates you from. From that program. Now you're the consciousness observing that program. It turns out the more conscious you become of how unconscious you are. Lighting a match in a dark place. That first step creates enormous amounts of chaos in the brain and body, and it's disturbing. So people just go back to the same addiction, the same emotion, the same problem. This feels better. No, that feels familiar. So they said, okay, now I gotta change. I gotta reinvent myself. Now, this is really important because they started sitting down and thinking, okay, who in history do I admire? Who are great people, role models that I can follow? What are the qualities and characteristics that they have? How am I going to change? These are what we call frontal lobe questions. The creative center of the brain switches on, and the emotional center settles down. So then they started thinking, how would I have to be in a new life if I was really going to heal? What would I have to change about myself? Now there's this interesting phenomenon that if you close your eyes and you begin to think about doing something. You're an athlete. You understand this. If you're background in football and you are running a pattern or you are doing something, you would rehearse it in your mind. Turns out that the act of mentally rehearsing something, when you're truly present, your brain does not know the difference between what's going on out there. And what's going on going on in here. In fact, your brain will begin to look like you've been doing it for the last five days. And you've never run the course. So now your brain is no longer a record of the past. Because typically it is now. It's a map to the future. So now you're priming your brain. So that became the great platform, you know, experiments with piano Players, you know, you take a group of people that never played the piano before, you divide them into two different categories. Take one group of people, you teach them one handed scales and corners, you do a brain scan on them. They come and practice for two hours a day for five days. At the end of five days, if you re scan the brain, they grow new circuits on the opposite side of the brain. Nothing magical there. You learn something new. Learning's making new connections. Get some instruction. You get instruction. You get your body involved, get your body involved, you're gonna have an experience. Experience enriches the brain. Pay attention to what you're doing. You got to pay attention and repeat it. Firing and wiring, you're going to assemble new circuits. You can take the other group of people, have them come for two hours a day, for five days, do a brain scan before the brain scan after, have them close their eyes and mentally rehearse playing those scales and chords. At the end of five days, they'll grow the same amount of circuits in their brain as the people who actually physically demonstrated the action. What does that mean? It means not only they change their brain by thinking differently, but their brain looks like they've been playing the piano for five days now. Set them in front of of a piano, never played the piano before. They'll play those scales and chords because their brain is wired to play it. So now the act of rehearsing who they're going to be, what are the qualities. And beginning to get in this creative state, began to lay down the circuits of a new personality. And a new personality is connected to a new personal reality. So the next question is, does that change the body? Take a group of men, have them do one handed curls in their mind and bring an emotional component like stronger, harder, more intense. One hour today for two weeks. At the end of two weeks, 13.5 increase in muscle strength, never lifted a weight. Now their body is changing by thought alone. So these people began to reprogram their brain and body and all of a sudden they began to act differently. Why? Because they installed the circuits, they began to think differently. Of course they began to feel differently. They were no longer feeling pain, they're actually liking themselves, right? So then if they're living by a different emotion and they're feeling an elevated emotion before they're healing, before they were healed, they're not waiting for their healing to feel joy and gratitude. They're feeling gratitude and joy. Now their body is believing that it's healed because the body's feeling the emotion ahead of the Experience. Experience. And if the environment signals the gene, and the end product of an experience in the environment is emotion, you're signaling the gene ahead of the environment. And what do genes do? Genes make proteins. And what are proteins responsible? The structure and function of the body. Now you're literally becoming somebody else. And now you're turning down the genes for disease and you're turning up these other genes. So I started to realize that this reinvention process is exactly what we've always done. It's just that we get complacent in certain areas of our life and we stop now. The last thing they had in common, the fourth thing, is that when they were doing that rehearsal process, they had long moments where they lost track of time and space. In other words, they were so involved in their inner world of imaging that when they turned the light on the room or they lift their blindfold up or whatever they were doing, they thought it was 20 minutes later. And it was an hour and two, 20 minutes later. And when you're truly focused and you're truly paying attention and you're in the present moment, all of a sudden you will leave this three dimensional reality. And when you leave this three dimensional reality, there's only one other place you go. And that is the realm of thought. And that's called the quantum field. And that quantum field is where all possibilities exist. Right? So they were connecting to a field of information that had everything to do with the first principle, which is that invisible intelligence that's both within us and all around us, personal and universal. It is the unifying field that governs everything material in this world. And if you're going to change something material, that means you got to get beyond your body to heal your body, Right? Because if you're your body trying to heal your body, there's one thing that we can guarantee. It's going to take time, it's going to just take a long time. Because you're playing by the rules of Newtonian physics. You play by rules of quantum physics. Energy dictates matter. So when you're truly in the field and you're making changes there, then the downward cascade, neurologically, biologically, chemically, hormonally, genetically, is the side effect of what's doing, what's happening in the field.

Accelerates.

Accelerates it. Exactly. So you do it in less time because you're more connected to a realm that doesn't play by time.

I think we have like maybe five, six, maybe seven strong positive memories. Many. Then we have five or six or seven like strong negative memories that we always kind of reflect back to and think about. And obviously there's filler memories. But I was trying. I was like, I don't really remember much from ages 5 to 18 in between those 5 to 10 memories on each side.

The reason that you have those really high positives and maybe really low negatives was because of the emotionality attached.

So.

So the bigger the emotion, we tend to be able to retain those memories, those memories, because our memory center, our emotional center, our limbic system, it's all interconnected. And a lot of the reasons why we encode and then can retrieve, essentially put the memory in and access it later is because of the emotionality. How strong it was, how strong it was.

So what were the memories you had, experiences you had that created the limiting belief, beliefs, scarcity.

It's interesting you say this, because then there's another category, and this is where I fall. And I actually diagnosed myself with a memory impairment for quite some years. Memory impairment, impairment based on the fact that I had no memories.

I dated a girl that said she didn't remember anything between before 18 one time. I was like, she was super positive and amazing and loving. And I was like, there's something off if you don't remember anything before 18, nothing. I was like, how's that possible? There's got to be some serious trauma that you're right. And later I found out, like, there was incredible trauma.

But I think societally, so there is that, so society. So when I realized I had no memory, I had two. Two theories, two working theories. One was that I had such a cataclysmic trauma, you know, that I can't remember, and that washed all my memories. And I spent a lot of time thinking and, oh, gosh, you know, what could it have been? And I keep coming up with, I don't. And then the other diagnosis that I gave myself was a memory impairment. So anyway, flashing forward, I've now come to realize that I started to share when I got the Instagram platform. I started to talk a bit more openly about my lack of memories. I started to understand our nervous system and our stress responses a bit more. And I came to realize that more of us than you would realize are like this ex of yours and myself that we don't have. We block the memories and it doesn't have to be, you know, a biological thing wrong in our brains. And it doesn't have to be. The big T is like the big T trauma that I think a lot of us talk about. The big Cataclysmic event.

I think you'd remember the trauma bigger, but.

Right. Yeah. So sometimes it's a low lie or a low level stress, chronic stress, an inability to have emotions present in the home that results in that lack of memory. So anyway, speak. To answer your question though, the way I came to know that I had a lot of my lack being based mindset was because we still remember. So I have people who reach out to me like oh my gosh, if I can't remember, how will I heal? So I don't have a visual memory, I can't go back in time. And when I talk about inner child work and you go back to heal, you don't need the memory to heal the way that I see it. Because we all are a walking memory, whether it's in habits based on our reactions, our triggers, our patterns, the thoughts that we frequently think. So a lot of Maya would have orbit around lack based or not having type of things, lack of consideration. So we can see evidence of our past whether or not we see our past. Yes.

So you were being, you know, for example, you were like, where's my food? My half is gone. Or you took three fourth. And so that's definitely like reflecting a memory of experiences or an experience you had that you held on to and said like I'm not deserving of enough or there's never going to be enough or whatever. The story you said to yourself. Right.

A lot of mine was based around this concept of being considered. So for me it was a bit of emergence between lack. So when I attribute that to my dad, he very much was. My parents are much older. When they had me, my mom was 42 and my dad was 45.

How old are you now?

So. And I am third. I'll be 37 in September, same age. So yeah. So my dad very much had a lot of the depression error based thinking. I mean my garage looks like a fallout shelter with literally twine wrapped up. Because enough twine put together you have a rope. I mean that kind of so very direct ways and indirect ways. I'm sure my dad's messaging about money and holding and keeping and then the consideration piece gets wrapped up in there.

For me, you weren't being taken, you.

Weren'T being considered being seen or being thought about. And that comes to my mother who was very much emotionally completely vacant, absent and so not feeling seen, heard, understood. So for me, when items would go missing like my brownie that I really wanted, it was, it became not only do I not have enough for me, but the meaning that I'm not considered, that would open up a really deep wound. So when my partner's looking at me like, what the hell is wrong with you? It's a brownie, Nicole. I'll go get you another one. You know what I mean? So. But inside I was like a little girl who is not being seen and was being told that there's not enough for me. And I mean, so that's where that pain was coming from. When I was tearing around the apartment about my brownie, it wasn't about my brownie. And I think that's the way that, I mean, if we all look at ourself and our patterns, and I'm always talking about developing self observation to do that. All of our clues are there. Our past is present with us and that's why we're stuck and that's why we can't. The way I see it, at least that's why a lot of us struggle to move forward. And that's why I hear the word stuck probably more often than I hear any word spoken.

So how do people get unstuck?

First, I think consciousness. We have to become conscious to ourselves because we're in our autopilot 95% of the day if we're not conscious. And that's going to be the program, I mean the computer analogy is I think, the one that we all understand the most. That's going to be the program that we're running day after day after day. So without consciousness there is no change. And then becoming conscious to our patterns, we are incredibly habitual creatures as humans. Whether it's our daily habits, you know, behavioral habits, whether or not it's our patterned thoughts that a lot of us have, we all tend to think the same content type thoughts. And then the way I say it is they induce feelings, actual changes in our body's physiology and our neurotransmitters and our stress hormones. And then that becomes our normal and that becomes our stuck place. So without consciousness, I don't think change happens.

So awareness, awareness, awareness of our patterns, of our triggers, of our pain, of the trauma. Does that mean healing the past first and reflecting on all the past? Is that why people do therapy, talk therapy? Because you're talking about the things that created the pattern?

Today I am always a believer and I explore this within myself a lot. How much is the past necessary? And I keep coming to the conclusion that it's necessary that becoming self observational understanding. I think that developing through a mindfulness based meditation practice is Incredibly helpful because it actually helps us to fire up our brain in a new way that then allows for self observation throughout the day. Because I don't think there's no magic cushion, there's no magic anything. At the way I see it, we can't do something once and then expect my day to look different magically because I've meditated in the morning. Yeah, there's some gains and some peace. I mean a joke you may. Oh, I meditate in the morning so I can, you know, calm my mind. Yeah, we get a little residual, you know, carry out, carry away from sitting and meditating. But if I'm not watching myself throughout the day and if I don't train myself to watch myself throughout the day, to watch my patterns, to watch the thoughts that are causing those emotional reactions, especially to see when I'm triggered just when I'm having a big feeling about a current event. Typically the feeling is really big. It's about the meaning assigned to the event, the similarity of this now event based on my past experiences. And so there's always a reason why things are way bigger than they maybe ought to be logically in that moment. And then that's where we dive in and give ourselves some new either releasing the emotional valve, soothing our own emotional wounds in that moment, not looking outside of anyone or anything else to make us feel better. At least that's the way that I view it.

So you're saying no one else should be determining our happiness?

Yeah, big proponent.

Yeah, yeah.

I talk a lot about interdependence is, is the kind of term that I've been going back to a lot recently. Essentially being, you know, because we are, we are social creatures as humans we actually benefited quite greatly from having tribes, you know, as we are evolving in terms of safety and division of labor. So as I see it, we all, we need quote, unquote, little n. We little n need relationships. But I think what interdependence means to me is being able to be a self reliant and resilient, you know, human, meeting all my physical, emotional needs separately and then having that shared space of relationship.

How does someone become interdependent if they've been so reliant on the needs of other people? Especially you know, under 18. The needs of parents for financial or, yeah, housing, food. Yeah, but if we're talking, you know, adults, how do you become interdependent? Well, you have a lot of trauma or pain or.

Well, I mean developmentally, Louis, that is the reality up until a certain and at this point, I think, unfortunately because of some of the financial struggles that many people are having, I think even now adults are finding themselves much more compromised and dependent.

College debt.

Yeah, place or living, you know, back to live at home to be able to pay for college debt. I mean it's really, it's a shame, it's sad because I think we're shifting back into that more just necessary dependence. So wherever you sit on that spectrum, I think that, think it's, you know, about breaking those patterns of looking outside of ourself to show up for others, take care of others, get my needs met by, you know, relating with others. Whether it's because they make me feel better or they distract me or I've learned that I come by this really naturally myself. My family was. And a very large reason why I'm not able or I choose now not to have contact with them is they are so enmeshed and codependent where there's just no boundary. And direct and indirect messaging that I got growing up was that I was responsible for other people's feelings in particular. So for me, evolving out of that and starting to separate myself off and just see myself as a self contained human also meant then showing up differently in my relationships, putting up the word we all love to hate, which is boundaries, and learning how to carve out space, not only physical space where my needs are might be different than another person's needs in that given moment, but more importantly emotional space. And that's I think, a struggle that a lot of us have.

Yeah, I mean I've. I feel like there's a lot of people that struggle with family, family and boundaries. I've gone through this challenge myself with different people in my family throughout the years. And on one end I have a lot of guilt tied to responsibility to make sure my family's taken care of at least basic needs.

Right.

On the other end I'm like, okay, we've all come from the same place. We all have certain skills and the capacity to take care of our basic needs. It's not like we were homeless or something like that. Like we all got college degrees. We're all very privileged in certain sense, right? Sure. We all faced a level of trauma and have a level, our own level of limiting beliefs based on experiences and trauma that each one of us felt separately. But I still have this problem, this challenge with like, okay, do I just make sure everyone's taken care of all the time and then I feel taken advantage of or abused or not respected or whatever it is or Do I set boundaries and have people potentially hate me and not want to talk to me? You know, you hear these catchphrases like, family is everything. Always be there for your family. Nothing else matters but family. But what about our own emotional well being? Doesn't that matter?

Yeah.

So how do we. How do we manage the guilt and pressure and the feeling responsibility of needing to provide for our family or take care at all costs versus having personal freedom and peace in our own heart?

Yeah, absolutely. It's tough. I made that noise when you said that first one, because family is everything. Might as well have been a plaque in your home. In my home. I mean, that was said as a mantra. Family is everything. Family is everything. Family is everything. It was under the guise of the Italian, you know, culture. My dad is very much, you know, kind of 100% Italian, so.

And if you're not a part of the family is everything motto, you might as well not be in the family.

Yeah, it was really. So a lot of us, I do know that we get that direct. Some of it's a bit more indirect where you're just kind of not urged or things aren't fostered that take you out of that family unit. So there's a lot of ways that I see it that these messages are internalized and then we become the adult that begins to believe that ourself on some level. So the thing I will always say first and foremost is boundaries suck, especially when you're creating them with our families. I mean, these are dynamics that have been sitting set in place for as long as some of us have walked the earth. So when we change a dynamic that's already one way, it sucks even. However I say that because it's uncomfortable to put up boundaries and to start to define limits of what it will no longer work for you. But what I see that saving ultimately over time. So the immediate discomfort that's really uncomfortable.

For some of us, it might be immediate. For years.

It might be. Yeah. But the way I see it on the other side is a much more sustainable relationship, because even in the description you said. Right. I start to feel resentful, taken advantage of. And the problem there is I then look to these people who are taking advantage of me or not respecting me or not giving me something back, and I get mad at them and then the relationship suffers. But unfortunately, I have to look at me and the role that I played in continuing to show up in a situation that wasn't working for me.

Wow. I learned a lot in the last few years about Setting, like, I used to really care about everyone's opinion about me, like, really. And want to try to, like, win them over if, like, one negative review, like, how can I win this person over? Even though there's thousands of positive comments or whatever on something and I was just like, I'm not gonna be able to change someone's mind necessarily. And me putting energy on one person to try to make them like, like me more is a waste of time. We've gotta. I think we've got to continue to just reflect on, like, okay, this person's not resonating with me. Is there something I can do to improve, to move forward? But if not, I'm not going to put my energy on trying to save one person's opinion about me. Right. So, yeah, I like this. So setting boundaries. Define the boundary. Creating like a calm communication or request with the boundary and then staying your word and following through on the boundary. Otherwise I'll never be met.

Yeah.

So how do you feel a year later, not talking to your family now?

So been a. It's been a year. I mean, coming to the decision to not talk to them was complicated. It was really difficult. And that's why I speak very openly and honestly about it, too, because I think I was. I'm very surprised when I get messages of other people that have. Have certain amounts of distance between their family. Complete, no contact. And I was not aware that there were so many other people that, you know, had had to put, or had chosen to put distance in because I did not come by that decision easily. It was. It was. It was painful for me.

35 years of life do that.

Yeah.

And. And I don't want to hurt them. And I do love them and I do want what's best for them, but I also have to love me and want what's best for me. So when I say it's been a hard year, I mean, I have moments, you know, the holidays, and there's the positive, the negative of that now. You know, on the one hand, it's like, oh, I can actually choose what I want to do for the holiday. That was completely new. Me and my partner are starting to make our own. Own life traditions because a requirement of family is everything is, you better believe you're showing up for the big Italian Christmas gathering. So I was. I was given little flexibility to have space apart around holidays. But obviously the other side of that came sadness, knowing that my family was having a holiday without me, with my nephew, who's young there. I mean, it's. It's complicated on a lot of levels.

We're talking bad about you or whatever.

I know, I know that, you know, it's being viewed probably not me. I'm pretty positive and my partner is very aware of this herself that she's probably been villainized. It's probably her who's taken me away from the foul. I mean, you know, whatever story that they want to are going to create, they're going to create.

It's tough though because you know, unfortunately sometimes if family is only destructive towards you, you shouldn't have to stay there and be responsible for their joy and happiness for decades. If they're always destructive towards your health. Right. On another end, you could say, well, I'm just not going to allow it to affect me. I'll be around them, I'll still show up. I won't like distance myself from the family, but I'm just not going to allow their thoughts or words or actions towards me affect me. Is that something that's healthy too though, just to be in the space while there's manipulation, guilt, shaming or whatever, judgment, whatever's happening in of front family dynamics. Can. Should people do that or should they more separate themselves fully from family if it's a constant?

I think if they can. I mean, if they can find the way. So for me, I got really good at being okay with it because what I would do and I didn't. Even though I heard this word in my schooling, I did not realize that this is what I was doing is I would dissociate. Dissociate. Yeah. So I would. I call it my spaceship where I would go away on.

I got present.

I wasn't present. I mean I got very savvy. You would not have any idea having a conversation with me. You know, I would be in that.

Looking through me.

Yeah. So let's. Yeah, so let's let me tie this all together. The reason I could not remember my childhood is because I dissociate it. So I wasn't present enough to put it in. So there's nothing there to re access. So that's just to tie that physically present. But that was out of. Yeah, because of the emotional overwhelm of the family, the anxiety and no one modeling or helping me to navigate those feelings as we do as children. I will always say this as children. Children. I believe we come to this planet however you think we get here, as adaptive, intuitive creatures.

Yeah, of course.

We all have a guidance system and we all are incredibly flexible and adaptive. So I adapted. I dealt with My own emotions, my own way, which was I dissociated. So some people though, in adulthood can find the way to show up with their families. Not like I talk a lot about depersonalizing, simply meaning not owning it. You know, even if they say something negative to you, if you can see that as more of a reflection of, of them, yeah, you can maybe, maybe come and go and leave that interaction and be okay enough, you know what to expect. You're not expecting them to change. You arrive, you deal with it, laugh at the situation. You can maybe, I think humor is incredible. And then you leave. I did not find myself able though for that. I did not want to use my old habit of dissociation. And then like I said, because of just the living structure and just the in depth ingrainedness of, of their dynamics, it was much harder for me to find that okay space. I don't know honestly what the future brings, I'm just, I'm doing and I'm using. And so part of what would happen, I would go back, you know, to visit and then my partner would notice this as well. And I would then become almost regressed, I'd become reactive. So I was trying to heal, but I would only get so far and then I'd be pulled right back down or the next health crisis, I'd be pulled right back in. So my healing was limited. So this year has been incredible for me to be able to actually gain some more full traction to do my own inner healing so that I don't know if a future comes and I can have some version of contact with them. I'm not sure, but I know that I have to be in a different place if I am going to be that person who can come home, let them be them and leave that home intact.

I'm curious. I feel like a lot of people have, have challenges, right. Whether it be family or limiting beliefs, scarcity, relationships, health, whatever it may be. And a lot of people do talk therapy, but why does it seem like most traditional talk therapy doesn't work and people keep going?

Yeah.

And how can it work better for them? What do they need to do so that it starts to see benefits and results?

Yeah. Yeah.

What's your thoughts?

I'm really happy you asked that. So one of the reasons, I think, and this is this happened in my own life. So anxiety was all I knew. I went to multiple years of talk therapy myself. I was actually in what is called a psychoanalytic training program. So think Freud, the couch clocking. I mean, these are people that Go into treatment hour, I mean each day of the week, you know, five days a week for an hour. So I was training in that modality. And part of that training was we had to lay on the couch ourself. And so, so at some points I was up in therapy two hours a week, I was on medication, I had my ssri, my benzo in the back pocket and I was taking the traditional routes of treatment and I still wasn't getting better. So for me, realizing that we have to look at the whole person, that's why I now work holistically, that there's a body that my mind that's unwell, if you will, is attached to. So for me it was expensive exploring the nutritional, the sleep, all of the lifestyle based stuff because I was so physiologically out of balance that I wasn't able to. A lot of my symptoms really of anxiety, even, sometimes even of depression or what we think of as depression are the result of this physiological imbalance.

Lack of sleep, anxiety.

Yeah, big time. Food, gut damage. I mean, we now know that the gut is incredibly important in our health. It's not only where nutrients are absorbed, that damage to the gut results in chronic inflammation that can be really, really problematic, you know, in terms of our mental wellness. So for me, without that, I was just contributing and exacerbating my anxiety. So no amount of talking in a room, the way I say it, or even medication because we also now know that the medication that we thought all the neurotransmitters were in our brain, like I said, are in our gut.

So yeah, so we're doing talk therapy, then having a couple gallon of ice cream and pizza afterwards. It's probably not going to help us because we're going to go up, down, up, down, up, down constantly.

Yeah. So, and I can assure you I've yet to find a program or meet a clinician and I now have a whole network of them that I'm connected to that have had any version. I mean the nutrition, the gut, the body is not mentioned in any, in any training program. So I think that's a huge limitation. I also know that another big, big problem for a lot of us, whether or not we have the big T of trauma or the lower little T of trauma, is a dysregulated nervous system.

Yeah.

So now there's science. Yeah, so now there's an incredible amount of science. Even Dr. Stephen Porges is amazing. He does polyvagal theory. And so to put it really simple, unless we start to address that dysregulation in our nervous system that at this part most of us have that's going to limit treatment.

So the sympathetic is that fight or flight.

Fight or flight. Most of us are spending most of our time chronically and fight or flight. I mean from this. I mean I'm looking out the vast city in the background. I mean some. For some of us the city is enough. My mind has now taken on a whole other capacity to induce stress. So a lot of us humans are living chronically stressed.

You could be peace, you could be in nature, but your mind could be in traffic.

Yes.

Thinking of an anxious.

And then you could. You could have induced a completely in a panic attack. I mean I've seen it happen in my office. You know, content we're talking about. Before I know it the person's having a complete visceral reaction. Right. So without regulation of that nervous system. I see that treatment talking about it only goes so far because we had a great session. Thanks Lois. See you next week. And now I'm out out the door with my overactive nervous system and that next thing's going to activate me and the next thing's going to activate me and I'm gonna have a fight with my partner. That also speaks to the power of the subconscious. So what therapy is is talking from the conscious mind. We can have a great insightful, you know, therapy session. I can understand, I can even have a great game plan. But then I'm back out the door and if I'm not conscious I'm back in my subconscious and then I'm back in those patterns. So then what I would see week after week may too. I thought I was very insightful. I thought I knew myself right. And I'd work with people. We had a great session and back the next week and it's the same rapport. Oh got in the same fights with my partner. Still stressed out about work. It's like nothing's changing. And it's because again than therapy the way I see it only addresses that conscious mind. Even the best laid plans of what we're going to do that next time we're activated only go as far as me remembering to do being aware and.

Mindful in the moment when we're triggered.

Right to do these new things. So I think that those whether it's the lack of the body attention, the lack of addressing the dysregulated nervous system or really us not understanding. I mean the subconscious is. Is as crazy as this might sound not talked about in. In any training program. So unless these clinicians are given these tools. I think that a lot of them are gonna. And so part of it I was nervous. I was, I wasn't sure when I started to go and shout from the rooftops these new holistic methods and how I did, you know, find the traditional model, model to be limiting. I was nervous about what my peers were gonna say and they've been nothing but receptive and I think a bit relief. I actually offer professional mentorship sessions now and I have at least one or two professionals a week that I'll speak to and help to update, help them to update their practices in these ways.

Say I feel cold in 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 right. Right now. That does not mean most people actually.

Who are depressed just aren't smiling as well. 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 like 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.

Right.

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 a spontaneous thought will pop back in based on your experience, based on sensory, based on how you're feeling or perceiving something, your environment, it's just gonna keep popping in.

Right.

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. 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 is in wellness and in popular psychology, is that your body hears every thought you have. What a terrible thing to put on people. 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 make a love of your life.

Someone likes 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 en 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. The hallmark of growth mindset is really two things. One is I'm not where I want to be now, but I, but I will, 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 most part 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 love 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 accidentally. 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 you know, one should never confuse what is real. Right? So no. So if you're, 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 potential, 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 hill, 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 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 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 craftswoman. Every time you're working in the. 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. 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 is 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. Yeah, 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 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. I want to be 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. Methamphetamine stimulate so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source. It becomes the goal, 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. 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 huge hunting, or it needs food for its young, it's going to 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 going to feel agitation and start looking and roaming and searching. Foraging, 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 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.

So it reminds you like that's not the path to go down.

That's right. Interesting. 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 going to 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.

So to really make it concrete and.

Is there too much, Is there too much thing? Is there such thing as too much dopamine 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 I love social media for the reason that you see the molecules in the memes. So it's like, get after it. What do sharks do on Monday? Or I can't remember the specific things. Or then they're the. Sometimes it's just time to chill. Well, that's a different molecule. That's serotonin. And then dopamine is the get after it molecule. And epinephrine is effort. So if we were 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. It's exerting effort. Dopamine is about reward, but more so about motivation and pursuit of rewards.

Feel a feeling until it no longer requires to be felt.

Why do we. Why should we do that. So give me an example of a feeling.

So let's imagine you, you and your ex wife are not getting on and you have a feeling of rage about the fact that she's trying to get your kid to call a new guy daddy and she's blocking you out. And you feel so angry you think, oh, I mustn't feel angry. You know, she's doing it for the interest of my kid. And so I just drink the anger and I drink the anger. And you see with a feeling, it's the most real thing you have. A feeling is like a little kid in a class going, notice me, I'm over here. And if you, you don't, they get more and more out of control. And so when you don't acknowledge your feelings, they regroup. And they regroup until they become outraged rage coming out. And then suddenly they go a bit crazy in the car park of a store or the line of a store because the mind says, I've got all this rage wants to come out. Someone just cut into the line, take it out on them. And it's so ineffective because I have something I call triple A, which is be aware of your feeling. Most people have no idea what they feel. They go, I shouldn't feel jealous, I shouldn't feel envious, I shouldn't be furious with this kid who's keeping me up all night. So they're not aware of it. They certainly can't accept it. And they never get to articulate it. If you can say, you know, my wife's a good person, but actually I'm furious with what she's doing, it really hurts my feelings. That's why group therapy in places like aa. The good thing is you get to say, sometimes I could quite cheerfully hurt my wife. I'm not going to. But I feel like, oh yeah, I feel like that too. Because when you can express your feeling, it goes away. Goes away immediately. But when you communicate it.

Yeah.

Even to yourself. So if your mother in law is the absolute bitch from hell and you can't say, by the way, Dorothy, you are the one most horrible mother in law in the world. But you just go and shut yourself in the bathroom, turn on the taps, flutter and say, dorothy is a really unpleasant mother in law. And one of my feel so much better because you're not saying it to them. It's like feelings are like gas. They're in or they're out and they hurt much more when you keep them in and you want to let them out. Gas. Are you not Obviously, right in the middle of a meeting. But when you keep stuff in, it causes you pain. And one of my amazing therapists said my mother in law really was the mother in law from hell. And I could never say anything because my husband was the golden boy. But after I trained with her, I started to say, you know, Brenda, you're a really unhappy person. And I know you're trying to hurt my feelings, but I just feel so bad. And Brenda finally said to me, I've been bulimic for 32 years. Nobody knows. Could you help me? She completely transformed that woman in two sessions. Never been bulimic since. Now she likes me more than her son. Now I'm now the daughter in law from heaven. I've got a big halo.

Wow.

But when we keep everything in, it does so much damage. It's like with little kids, they get angry and we shout at them. They go, oh, my anger makes you angry. And I'm not allowed to be angry. I'm not allowed to say something. And all psychiatrists will tell you that. If you want to be sorted out, here's something you must do. Express your hurt as close to the event that hurt you happening as possible. You can't say to your dad, you know, 20 years, I asked for a bike and you got me a skateboard. I didn't want that. Well, I worked nights to buy you that bike. You can't get any resolution after 10 years or 20 years. But when you can say to your friend, look, I love you, you're my friend. But if it really hurt me when you didn't even turn up to my wedding and I still had to pay for all of that, and you didn't call and it hurt me. I still loved you, but you hurt my feelings, then it's gone. But when you keep it in, it doesn't. When you say to them, you make me feel so angry. Well, you make me feel angry. I didn't come to your wedding because your guest list, that was extortionate, asking for all this stuff. I mean, I'm not Bank of America and I don't want to buy that stuff. But you can't get resolution. But when you say, I was hurt when or I felt hurt by, and you can say it to a wall, you can say it to a force, you can say it to a mirror.

You can write it down, it's not.

For the other person. It's good to say it because it's out then. And then it goes away. It's the most wonderful thing. It goes away. And then everything is so different.

Yeah, it's interesting because the last two years specifically it's been magnified with men in the media who have created all these, you know, killing, shootings.

Yeah, I know.

Racial marches, political distress, you know, domestic violence. All these things have been happening. And it's been magnified over the last couple years. Right. With me too. And time's up and everything. And as a society, when men are unable to express or communicate themselves or they're going to be known as weak or soft or whatever the word is, it's. It's hard for them to, to express themselves in any, any other way except for this blow up.

Yeah, especially when you say this like, stop acting like a girl. You're running like a girl. Exactly, you're acting like a girl.

Don't be a worse, don't. Yes, don't be. It's like less than their manhood or something.

Of course, there's no wonder why if.

It'S not acceptable for men to express themselves in this way, it's hard for them to just be stoic constantly. I'm not saying it's okay what they've done to act out, but I think society in general needs to have a bit of big group hug and let it out in a way where it's more acceptable to our express.

And also whenever anyone does anything wrong, we go, what's wrong with you? We should say what happened to you? What happened to you? And they'll go, well, you know, my mom always said she didn't want a girl, boy, she wanted a girl. And I was being brought up, give an example. I had a city trader as a client who really had problems trading. And his boss said, you know, he's the best trader. But he said, nervous. And when I worked with him when he was a kid, his parents had two girls and then him and he would smash his Tonka toys. And they go, what's wrong with you? Look at your sisters just combing their doll's hair and they're so good. And why are you so aggressive? And a 4 year old can't go. Well, because I have something called testosterone and they don't. And I'm designed to run and jump and hunt and fish and I got to learn what to do with aggression to smashing my cars together is good for me. He didn't. A four year old doesn't have anything because they live in the world. Yeah, they just live in a world of feeling, not logic. And he said, I never realized, just spent my whole life thinking something's wrong with me? Because my parents would start everything, what's wrong with you? Look how neat. He says they don't get peas on the floor when they eat. And he said, I heard it every day until I formed a belief, something's wrong with me. He didn't date women because he thought, well, I should be like one, but I want to be like a man. And that session totally turned him around. He said it was like someone had sprayed him with pheromones because he went out that night when we attached him to, like a magnet. But he just got rid of the feeling of something's wrong with me. Because most people do walk around going, something's wrong with me. I'm just majorly messed up. And you can't heal.

And no one understands me. No one gets me.

Yeah.

And I don't understand me. And if I don't understand me, how can you?

And why should I even be here?

Yeah. Because you can't heal what you can't understand. And so all the. Treating the symptom is like putting a band aid on an infection. When you understand it, you can totally change your perception of what it is, because events actually don't affect you, but the meaning you attach is them does.

The story we tell ourselves about the story.

And that's. I love that because when. When I just got all my Stevie Awards, it's like, I've got an Oscar. And that's good because I take clients stories and I give them a happy ending. Always give them a happy ending. But then you have to understand a bit more of psychology, because humans are hardwired to recreate what they know. We like what's familiar, even if that's very. Even if it's very bad. If I've never had money and I win the lottery, I'm going to get rid of it. Or if I've never had love and you love me, I'm going to reject you. Because it's so unfamiliar. If I've had a dad who calls me an idiot and worthless, guess what kind of guy I like? That's it. Because when I meet them, I go, oh, I feel like I've known this guy my whole life. We just clicked. And they think, oh, my God, it's because he's my dad. But now I've been sleeping with him for six months. I don't know what to do with that now. Because we are wired to like what is familiar and to resist what's unfamiliar. And that's what kept us alive when we lived in Walled City. We didn't go. I'm a bit bored with this group. I think I'll go outside the walled city and find another tribe, because they might have killed you. So we have this wiring that says, run towards what's familiar and run away from what's unfamiliar. But the very good news is you can make any. Anything familiar. And the most important thing to make familiar is praising yourself. That's if you could just do that, that in itself would change your entire life.

How do you praise yourself?

Well, you get up in the morning and go, I'm a good person. I have a skill, I have a talent. I have something to offer the world. I'm here for a reason. You look in the mirror and go, oh, there you are. You're a good person. You got a good heart. You know, the most important way to answer that question is this. What did you always want your dad to tell you? Even if you never had a dad, if you had a dad, a good dad, what would he have said? What would your mom. What would a nice teacher have said to you? And it would be something like this, I'm proud of you. You're a good son. I'm so glad I'm your dad. How lucky I got to have you. And a teacher would say, you're such a smart kid. What a joy it is to teach you because you're smart and we all want to hear the same stuff. I love you. I'm proud of you. You're interesting, you're a great company. Nobody needs to hear, I'm the best dentist in Beverly Hills. Because that doesn't work. It's emotions. And many of my clients, their mother might be dead, but they're still trying to get her to approve of them. Dad's living in another country, but they're still working to make him like them. And you know, the most important thing is you like you. So whatever you wanted to hear, say it to yourself. Because your mind doesn't even know that it's coming. And also, it doesn't care. Your mind doesn't care if what you tell it is right or wrong or true or false or even if it's good or bad. It lets it in like chapstick on your lips. Your lips don't go, is this organic Fair trade just lets it in. It needs a bit of nourishment and we need some nourishment. And words are very nourishing. And there is actually nothing on the planet that will raise your self esteem like praise. But self praise is better because if I said to you, I just adore you. You're amazing, by the way. You know, can you do this? And this and this. I've manipulated you. But if I say it to myself, my mind knows there's no manipulation. Manipulation. And the mind likes repetition. And when you say every day, your mind kind of goes, oh, yeah, here you go again with that phrase. You say it every day. Must be true. And now it sinks in. Problem is, if you criticize yourself every day, it says the same thing as well.

And that hurts you. It's interesting because you know the big talents that commit suicide or die. You know the. Who's the comedian? Robin.

Robin Williams.

Robin Williams, Amy Winehouse, all these individuals. Individuals who have the world praising them.

Yeah.

They weren't able to praise themselves.

Yeah. And they don't let it in.

It doesn't matter if everyone else acknowledges you. Yeah, it does matter. But you have to be willing to acknowledge yourself as well.

Right.

And the familiar, unfamiliar. If praise is unfamiliar, but criticism is familiar. And you say to someone like Robin Williams, oh, my God, that last show was funny. Didn't you notice? I've left out the best. I fluffed a word.

You.

It wasn't as good as the one before. So if you're not used to praise, you'll reject it. And if you're used to criticism, you'll add it in. Because we do what's familiar. So if we say to someone, I love your book, they go, oh, actually, it's not that good. The other one is much. I love your top. Oh, I got it in a car boot sale. It's five years, I've got a hole in it. So if we haven't got praise, we actually reject it. And you just have to say to yourself, I'm going to make this familiar. I'm going to praise myself every day. It might feel weird, but I'll keep doing it. It's a bit like running. You know, running isn't familiar, especially around Beverly Hills. But if you put your shoes on and go for a run on concrete, eventually it becomes familiar and then you like it. I mean, sticking a lens in your eye, that's the weirdest thing. Very unfamiliar the first few times, oh, my God, I'm coming in my eye like that. And then after a while, you can do it almost without thinking because you get used to it.

You.

You can make anything familiar or unfamiliar. And my advice to everyone is look at your bad habits and make them unfamiliar and look at what you want, especially praise and make it familiar. More so, because if you've got a startup or you're working for yourself, the days of a boss going, well done, good job, pat on the back are over. And you have a praise muscle and no one's going to build it up except for you. But if you build it up, it makes you bulletproof.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I'm so glad you're talking about this because we have a similar philosophy and a lot of people that come to me are afraid of certain things. And at an early age I was afraid of a lot of things. I was afraid to talk to girls as a 12 year old. I was afraid of speaking in public, I was afraid of dancing. I was afraid of all these things. Right. And I got so sick and tired of being, being afraid that I just said, I'm gonna give myself a challenge every day. You know, when I had a, when I was afraid of girls, I was like, every time I see a girl that gives me butterflies, I'm gonna go up to them and start a conversation and it's terrifying and I'm sweating and I'm stumbling on my words. And people rejected me the first few times, but I just kept doing it until the girl said, hi to see you. And you give a little confidence until, you know, by the end of this summer when I was a teenager, it was like every girl was talking to me, of course. And I tell people, you gotta embrace the fear until the fear disappears.

Yeah.

It's similar with the feelings. You've got to live in the feelings. Until.

What would you say feel? The feeling no longer requires to be felt. That's right. Because what you're really describing so eloquently is you had a massive fear of rejection. Talking to girls, speaking in public, asking, doing enough. Yeah. Someone asking to employ or you will pay you. So we have a great fear of rejection, which is not surprising because when we're born, we have two drivers. Find connection, avoid rejection. After all, if a mother rejects a child, if a lion rejects the cub, it's not going to be adopted. It will die or it just starves to death. And so we know innately that our survival on the planet is linked to not being rejected. And not that long ago, you would have died from rejection. You know, in a thousand years ago, when they banished you outside the walls of the city, or you marooned a difficult sailor, or you cast someone out of the community, you pretty much died. There was nothing out there but purgatory. So we have a wiring that says, rejection will kill me. And that's why you had the fear. But when you can dialogue with your no, it feels like it will kill me. It can't kill me because no girl can reject me unless I give her my permission. You can't reject me unless I agree with everything. I don't like you because you got short hair. I don't like your shirt. I don't like you because you're white. Not white, all short glasses, not. But when you say you can't reject me, I can't be rejected because the only person you can reject me is me. You can talk to girls realizing even if they say, no, you're not my type, I'm with someone, no, thanks. Or even if no, they can only reject you if you let that in. And we look at someone like James Corden, who's certainly not gorgeous, but women love him because he's funny. So funny, so funny. You know, we like warm people. You know, the packaging is all very nice. We'll as well have a great packaging, a great rapper and it'll. But they're unhappy. And so our greatest fear is to be rejected. But the truth is, in 2018, you could live in this apartment, have Amazon deliver your groceries, never see a soul, and you probably live until you're 106. Wouldn't advise it. But we don't die of rejection anymore. But we still feel like we will. And all schools should be teaching kids, you cannot be rejected. You can ask for a pay rise, you can ask for crowdfunding. You can go to someone and go, here's my idea. You can write a book, speak in public. Because I work with a lot of actors who say, I'm so scared of rejection. I'm like, well, how are you going to be an actor then?

Because you're supposed to be rejected.

You. And I write books for everyone who loves it. There's going to be the odd person because I hate this book and I hate that writer too. But we don't let it in. We have to laugh about it. When you give a YouTube talk, I mean, I've got one of my talks, got like 3 million views and there's a few in there going, I hate her stuck up English snob. But they don't know me because that's not me at all. But I don't go, oh my God, I can never write another book. I can, I'm okay, because I don't let it in. Because the only opinion that matters is my opinion. I know I'm not a stuck up English snob, so that can't hurt me. Because if it did, I wouldn't be sharing it with you.

Most human beings right now are only suffering their memory, isn't it?

Yeah.

This moment. They're not suffering what happens yesterday? They're suffering what happened 10 days ago, they're suffering. Why? What happened 25 years ago? They're still suffering.

When they hold on to the thought, the memory.

See, it is not their choice.