Neuroscientists Reveal How To Heal Your Mind [MASTERCLASS] EP 1353

There is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful over states of mind and body. Thoughts happen spontaneously all the time. They're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection. But thoughts can also be deliberately introduced.

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What.

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

Actually who are depressed just aren't smiling as well. That's right. Like when you change your physiology, doesn't it also start to change the way you think about yourself a little bit?

The reason I call it a brain-body contract early on is that the brain and the body are constantly in dialogue. So, you know, the idea that when we're depressed, we tend to be in more defensive type postures, when we're feeling good, we tend to be in more like relaxed and extended postures, all true. But it does not mean that just by occupying the extended posture that I'm gonna 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. Subjective, there is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful over states of mind and body. 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 gonna 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 wanna 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. You have to constantly be intentional and deliberate about what you think, otherwise, and a spontaneous thought will pop back in.

That's right.

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

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

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

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

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'm capable of getting there eventually. The other is to attach a sense of reward to the effort process itself. In fact, Don't reward the result, reward the effort. That's right.

And if you look at true high.

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

Our interpretation.

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

They're taking a step.

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

It's kind of adrenaline but in the brain.

With more effort, we're going to get more epinephrine. 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 say it's a person who's a craftsman or a crafts woman, every every time you're working in the shop and doing that, every bit of effort, you're taking a little bit of money out of this epinephrine account, you're spending epinephrine. At some point, those levels of epinephrine get high enough that you feel like quitting. It feels exhausted. 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. Max effort. The team that wins suddenly in a moment has the energy to jump all over the place party for days. They can talk, I mean, they have to have a conversation. 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 stimulates so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source. It becomes the goal and the path. It becomes the path and the destination. And you look at people's lives when they do a lot of cocaine and methamphetamine, and that baseline on their life goes down.

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

That's right.

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

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

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

That's right. And those events that- 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 gonna repeat those. Those actions led to failure previously and don't repeat those.

So dopamine triggers us to stay on the right path.

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

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

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 there are the, like, 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 going to break this down really concrete, we'd say adrenaline and epinephrine are about effort, just effort, with no subjective label on them, good or bad effort, whether or not it's stress or you're pursuing something you want to do. it's exerting effort. Dopamine is about reward, but more so about motivation and pursuit of rewards.

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

Brilliant question. It's a skill that we learn, so that's really nice to know. The sooner it's never too late to start, but the sooner we start the better. The thing, the biggest the biggest thing with the mind and managing mind, Lewis, is to accept that depression, anxiety, even the scary words like bipolar and schizophrenia, and then going to the mood sort of things like that we can accept grief, anger, etc. These are not illnesses. This is the biggest message that I probably have. The second biggest, the first is that mind is the source. And if you don't get mind right, everything else you can read all the great books you want and go to all the great seminars and self-help, but unless your mind is right, you won't ever use that stuff. It's just data. And so you, there's another step missing and it's understanding that autonomy, that sense of agency that we have to manage what's going on around us and to accept part of mind management is not to make the bad stuff go away, but to know how to live in the bad stuff because it's not going away. So despair, anger, depression, anxiety, these are all completely normal responses. In fact, they're very helpful. They're helpful messengers and warning signals as opposed to being scary illnesses. They are not neuropsychiatric brain diseases like we've been told. They are actually responses and because they are responses of our mind in the world, we use our brain and body to express them because we've got the mind has to have the brain and body to build the thoughts and then from we use that to speak. We're using our physical to store what we've processed and to convert and then to speak. So obviously if our mind's a mess, our brain and our body will be a mess. But because our brain's neuroplastic, and if we manage our mind, we can change our brain, we can change our DNA. Literally, that's what I've shown in my research. You can literally change your DNA, your blood markers, literally. If you change your mind? If you change your mind, you can immediately influence your biomarkers. So for example, if you are in acute trauma, for example, and you go through, okay, let me explain it in a very simple way. I've been testing out a glucose continuous glucose monitoring device, and for some research purposes. And I happened to, while I was wearing it, because you wear it and then you track your levels, and I wanted to see in terms of mental health and the neuro cycle that I've developed, I wanted to see the impact. And I happened to be going through, experienced a very acute tumor in our family over December. And in the moment of the tumor, I happened to see on my glucose monitor that my glucose had shot up to 240. Now that's heart attack level. And I immediately managed my mind through the neuro cycle, which is the concept that I've developed, which is just a system anyone can learn it. and I dropped my glucose levels within seconds back down to a normal level. And as it cycled up, it cycled, I could manage it. And if glucose is at that level, your cortisol's shot up at that level, your DHEA is dropped, your homocysteine is up. All that means is that your immune system is going crazy. Exactly. You've got a cytokine storm like we talk with COVID And in fact, your brain's immune system and your body's immune system will recognize that traumatic event or that established trauma or that mismanagement of whatever, that it will recognize that as an invader like a virus like COVID. So you get the same response to a mind thing, a thought, which is the consequence of mind. Think, feel, choose, you build thoughts. Thoughts are made of roots and trees, branches, which are the memories. So thoughts are made of memories, like trees are made of branches. This is toxic. It will stimulate the same response in the immune system as if I had COVID, or if I had a flu virus, or if I had measles or something, or any kind of damage in my body. The immune system sees that as threatening survival because we are wired for survival. So this is not survival. So your immune system says, Hey, that's a threat. Let's send out the army, T lymphocytes, B lymphocytes, macrophages. Let's go fix this thing. And it creates inflammation, which is a temporary state of healing. So initially inflammation is to isolate and fix. To protect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Isolate and fix. And then you're supposed to, you know, fix this up and sort this out and find the root cause. And then this goes away. And then the anti-inflammatory factors come in and the inflammation goes away. But if we don't deal with the stuff and we don't deal with our past traumas and we don't deal with those patterns in our life that we are in enacting, that's a constant arguments or these certain, you know, they all have these toxic patterns. No one's immune. And the signals of those are things like depression and anxiety and those are simply telling you, hey, there's a pattern. It's either trauma based pattern or it's a toxic habit you've developed. But that pattern is actually putting your body under tremendous stress, even to the point where your DNA is affected. And I showed in my research that, you know, if you think of the DNA ladder, if you pull out a chromosome, it looks like an X and where you see my fingernails, pink fingernails, for those of you that are listening, the pink fingernails would then represent what we call telomeres. And telomeres are a proxy for how.

You are managing your mind. Very interesting. Aren't they also, based on how long you'll live as well, if the telomeres are longer.

Exactly, totally correct.

So those are under attack and dying, you're probably physically gonna die as well.

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

Everything was off.

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

What page is this on?

This is on page... I should tell you, I should go to the page off my heart 161. Okay, cool. I think you probably got it in black and white in that version that you've got there. So this person's telomeres, when we looked at their DNA and we looked at their telomeres, they will tell you how the shorter they are, the weaker your cells, the shorter your lifespan, the more vulnerable you are to disease. So they were sitting, so that will show in terms of your biological age. So their telomeres were short and unhealthy. They, their ages were in the, of this particular subject, and we had a group like this as well that similar. They, they biological, the chronological, the actual age was in their mid-30s, but their.

Biological age- 70 or something.

Yes, a sickly 70 year old.

That's crazy.

Within crazy, within nine weeks of mind management. No, I didn't work on, I don't use drugs. I didn't, I do talk about diet and stuff, but in this particular clinical trial was pure mind management, just the neuro cycle. Just get your mind under control. And that gray means that their brain stabilized, that the brain waves that they were actually managing. So here they were saying, I am depression, I am hopeless, all the biomarkers, DNA. Here they're saying, I now know why I feel depression. I'm not depression. I now know why. And depression is simply a signal of an underlying cause. It's not who I am, it's not an it, it's not an illness. By 63 days, and these numbers are very significant, they were actually seeing behavior change in their life. They were saying, okay, so I know I'll still get depressed, but I know.

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And there was changes in their behaviour. They were back at work. They were back sleeping, 25% improvement in sleep. And I mean all kinds of like their relationships, not suicidal anymore. And I mean that's, I can go on and on and on. Wow. This subject over here was in the control group, so they got no mind management. And what you'll see is a lot of red and a lot of chaos. and that red shows complete brain that is like a tsunami in your brain, which the biomarkers were terrible, this person's DNA telomeres were very short. And so with mind management in nine weeks, we showed how you can literally change your telomeres, which are your markers for aging and for health, mental health and physical health. And that's pretty unusual because most of the work on telomeres has been done around diet and exercise, which are very significant.

Oh, like leafy greens and plant-based.

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

Something going on, you need to go.

And... Something's not working. Some is not working and it's manifesting as a pattern that needs to be.

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

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

Now that's not going to, that's not going to facilitate change. We have to do something.

So it's like a narrative.

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

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

You're experiencing something.

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

Oh man. What's the best way to train the emotional part of the brain? So that we are in, we have a personal power over it. That's a good control. That we have.

Or more.

It depends on the situation.

We can turn it up or turn it down and we are.

Depending on the, depending on what's going on.

Yeah, maybe we need to be more emotional in a moment and not be chill and relaxed when there's an attack.

Maybe the moment is so big, man. It's, of course you're just emotionally over the top. But that leaves you a flexibility. And it also leaves you without feeling bad, like, oh, I was emotional then. Now, I'm not a person that has emotional regulation. You don't have this brain the same forever. It's a constant trimming of the sails modulating tone. To me, it's a little bit of work if you're in a good spot, like, hey, don't, this ain't guaranteed.

Yeah.

But it's also so much power and opportunity that if you're, if you're not in a good spot, like, tomorrow can be better. And if not tomorrow, then the month or the year after.

Right.

So emotional regulation, the shortcut. So now we're getting to, like, is there a tip, you know, because I hope people feel like, wait a second, everything is possible, but it's going to.

Take a lot of work.

But are there shortcuts? Because I love shortcuts, LA freeways or whatever.

Right, Waze is good, yeah.

But there is one that has stood the test of time and that I can now explain to you based on things that we do as surgeons. And that's, I refer to as meditative breathing in my first book. but really it's pacing your breath. And so what does that do?

Is it something you study with actual scans or... No, no, no.

It's even wilder than that. I've got a direct feed of the true electricity from the surface of your naked body.

They're breathing.

Yeah, while they're sitting there.

What are you seeing on the brain activity recordings?

The same thing that we see when we get Valium, which is an anxiolytic. Their anxiety level goes down, their electricity goes from from fast to medium. Remember we started this and we're talking about athletes not wanting to be in fast, we want to be in the flow state. Meditative breathing led to direct changes in the electricity of their brain as measured not with a sticker on the forehead, but with a grid on the surface of the naked brain. It's true measurable changes in the electricity there for the mind. Meditative breathing that for thousands of years people have said can help you chill out is an anxiolytic and break anxiety. Well, we have proof of that now. And I think that's important for people to know that it's not just some, you know, it's just not a concept that's being thrown around too casually that through awake, direct electrophysiologic recording of seizure planning surgery at elite centers, while looking for the seizures, there's a lot of data coming out about let's play video games, let's do meditative breathing, let's read, and then what changes. And so that's what I love in book one that I shared was that's raw data. That's real data. And there's an explanation behind how that happens. And so what I would say to people is that's something you have that's free because I'm not selling anything.

Breathing.

And the pace of breathing and what's.

The pace that works best? I mean, there's lots of different techniques of meditative breathing.

They found, you know, it doesn't matter. You know, people say through your nose or mouth, and that's kind of the confusing stuff that's out there. Well, the nose and the mouth connect before they get to the trachea and goes to your lungs. So it doesn't matter how, but it's about slowing the cadence and making the cadence more methodical, a deep deep, you know, deep breath in and a deep breath out. It's no different than what we do in surgery when you feel the case getting a little out of your control.

What do you do?

Well, I first, the first thing is I just slow my breathing down. And that doesn't mean the solution will arise, but I know that puts me in my most calm and focused state to find the solution for the problem in front of me. And likely that's what athletes at Thrive do as well.

You don't want your brain surgeon being like, well, exactly.

But that's what stress does. It makes you hyperventilate, right? Absolutely. But if you just, that's a great point. If you just hyperventilate just because you're just doing it as just whatever, for whatever reason, you'll get physically jittery.

Yeah.

You will give yourself anxiety by just doing that. Yeah, I felt that just for a second. I'm showing you the proof on the other side. Do the opposite of hyperventilation and you'll.

Make yourself less frenetic.

One of the experiments that I did in my lab this last year was trying to find the most, the easiest, shortest intervention that we can do with students that would decrease their very high levels of anxiety.

What was that?

And so we tested many things just to walk outside, share yoga, all these things they can do online. This was all virtual. but one of the things that was very effective that I was so excited about is a mindful conversation. So what we did is we didn't go deep, we didn't want to have them reveal some deep, dark secret, but what we did is my student researchers had a script, they shared a real story about a favorite vacation, why it was favorite, it was real, they were really trying to share this this experience with them and then invited the student who they didn't know who was our experimentee to share the same thing. And in that year where everything was virtual and it was, you know, professors just said, okay, now learn these five chapters. Go ahead, go do it. And to have somebody there listening to their story, listening deeply and asking real questions because they were, it was only 10 minutes. completely decreased their anxiety.

Really?

By them sharing and someone listening or by them also listening to someone else's story.

You know, I think it was really the sharing and have somebody else listening because the first part, my students always went first. They didn't know exactly what was going to happen. So that was just to lay the groundwork and I think the interaction and the good feeling started to develop when they started to open up, sharing the story and seeing, oh my God, somebody is really listening to me. They're asking me a question about this event that meant something to them. And that just shows how powerful social interactions are. And even this short 10-minute thing between we thought about, should we get two friends? to try and have a conversation that was too hard to control. But I could control, we could control exactly the protocol of this stranger student and the kind of interaction they had.

Interesting.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Is there any research on if men or women are more anxious? Is there any research around this?

Like.

When men have more anxiety or stress or women have more anxiety or stress?

I think the stat, I should know this.

Are we all just messed up equally?

I think we're all messed up equally. There's more women with depression. Depression and anxiety are related but have different symptoms. But I think it's pretty equal for anxiety.

The reason I'm curious is because when I was studying about masculinity, years ago, I wrote a book called the Mask of Masculinity, which is kind of the mask that men wear to project and protect themselves from showing emotion and showing revealing themselves. And when I was on tour talking about it, I would always ask in every city and about 50% men and women would show up. And I would always ask like, okay, for the, for the ladies here, raise your hand if you have a girlfriend or girlfriend that you talk to once a week about your stress, your worry, your challenges in life, your work issues, your body issues, whatever it might be dealing with that you have someone, one or multiple girlfriends you speak with on a weekly basis. And pretty much the entire room of women raised their hands and said, Yes, every week I have at least one person. And I said, Keep your hands up if you do this every day. You call a girlfriend on the phone, you have lunch, you're just talking about something for a few minutes. And I go, How does it make you feel to be able to talk about these things? And they're like, It feels great. Yeah, to be able to share.

Yes. This.

Yeah. And say, okay, for the men in the room, raise your hand. If once a month you get together with a guy friend and you talk about your vulnerabilities, your insecurities, your body issues, your challenges at work, and you really open up to this other male friend.

Yeah.

Maybe one or two guys and out of hundreds would raise their hand. Yeah. And I would say you guys are part of a church group, right? Where you meet once a month and you're like, for an hour and you do these things. Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

And I say, okay, I go back to the ladies in the room. I say, ladies, imagine not being able to do this once a month. Only doing this once a month. How would it make you feel? They're like, I feel more anxiety, more stress. And I go, imagine these men who never do this.

Yeah.

In the room. They never share these things.

Yeah.

I'm not saying all men, but a lot of men don't feel like they have one guy friend they can open up and reveal to.

Yeah.

And I feel like but maybe there's another symptom, maybe it's just like they just wall themselves up and don't share emotion and there's other internal factors or physical ailments that they're caused from that stress. But I think it's, yeah, either way, I think it's important for everyone to learn how to share these things. And based on that study you did, I think it's when we share, whatever it is, even if it's five, ten minutes, it decreases the stress and the anxiety, it seems like it goes down. And I feel like we got to create better friendships or relationships or therapists or whatever that we can connect to and have that consistent communication stream.

Yeah.

Because otherwise when we trap, when we hold on to it, just bad things happen.

Yeah, yeah.

Bad things happen.

Absolutely. So how does that work? What is the change that we need in raising boys and talking to boys?

This is a whole, I mean, this is a dynamic. I grew up in the 80s and 90s. I was born in 83. And it was just not accepted to show emotion in elementary school, middle school, high school. It wasn't acceptable, especially as an athlete growing up in Ohio. It just wasn't, maybe in some part of Beverly Hills, or some posh school in New York City. I don't know, maybe in pockets there's some more, acceptability of younger boys showing this type of emotion. I don't know what it's like in 2021, but I just know that you were laughed at, you were made fun of if you cried, if you showed emotion. I remember wanting to put my arm around like guy buddies of mine and them pushing me away and saying, Don't be gay, you know, or just don't be a little girl. Don't be whatever the term is that was associated around something negative for them.

Them.

And so you learn in order to fit in to wall yourself or to not share the things that people won't like about you. And I'm not saying that's okay and we all have our responsibilities, but as young boys growing up when we're conditioned that way, it was hard to break that for me personally. And it took me a long time until I realized like, wow, this isn't working for for me. I have more stress and anxiety. It was really decades of stress and anxiety and not being able to sleep at night. That was the thing that the catalyst that you talked about that was like, enough is enough. Maybe for you as a social anxiety, but finally as a teacher, like, okay, I've got to show up differently to not stress all the time. And so eight plus years ago, I finally started to reveal myself. I was just like, okay, I can't live like this anymore. So everyone can know everything about all my shame, because I'd rather that happen and be alone, because I feel so much stress all the time. And then it gave me a lot of peace. And then I learned the process of healing and therapy work and workshops and all that stuff, and just healthier relationships in general. I don't know the solution. I don't know the solution, but I know I'm trying to be a better model for other men to witness I'm trying to bring other men on and have these types of conversations so that younger men could see like, okay, here's someone that maybe I like what he does or what he's very, he's an athlete and I can understand and relate to that. Hopefully I can start to do this with my own life or maybe with my girlfriend or my guy friend. Try to have some of these conversations, but I just think it's challenging in general. It's challenging when you're younger and you're trying to have a few friends and they don't accept it. That's tough.

Yeah, yeah.

Because no kid wants to be alone.

No, no.

They want to just hang out and go on the playground and just be with their buddies. So it's really challenging. I don't know. Do you have kids? No, I don't have kids. I don't have a solution to that, but I think as a, you know, I don't have kids either, but if I was a parent, I would just encourage showing emotion with my sons or daughters. and be the example, be vulnerability with them. Allow myself to feel, allow myself to cry if I'm watching a movie or something happens in my life and I'm feeling it to not wall up, but to allow myself. We're going up another topic here. We're going up another topic here for another conversation. But as an academic, as a neuroscientist, and a study of psychology and the brain and all these things, you've come from a very academic approach to your research. But a year ago, you you unfortunately lost your father and your brother around the same time. And while you were writing the book, and so you had to kind of shift some of the stuff writing the book because you were experiencing on an emotional level what you were kind of researching.

Yeah.

Can you share more the biggest lessons you learned from these types of losses for yourself on how you emotionally had to navigate it when maybe you didn't have the answers.

Yeah.

What did you learn from that experience?

Yeah, so it really was the week that I was about to dive in and start writing the real chapters of this book, Good Anxiety.

And.

That was when my younger brother passed away completely unexpectedly.

Younger brother.

My younger brother. just three months after our father had passed away. So we were just healing still raw from losing my father, our father, and then he had an unexpected heart attack.

Really?

And so first just that pain and grief that I was experiencing is not the same as anxiety. It shares some of those negative emotions.

This was just grief, sadness.

Grief, sadness. It was so... Anger of you. Like how could this happen? It feels like a different reality. Everything looked the same, but it just felt so different. And it forced me to explore these feelings that I'd have had inklings of in the past, but never to this extent. extent and kind of in this wave of first my dad and then my brother. And I slowly came back from it and I used some of the tools that I talk about in the book that were already in place for me. Morning meditation. So I do a morning tea meditation.

Tea meditation.

Tea meditation, which I describe in the book, which is a meditation over brewing and drinking tea. For me, That was the magic bullet for meditation because there's a sequence for brewing tea. You boil the water, you put it in the tea leaves, you let it seep, and then you pour it out and then you drink it. And that kind of sequence kept my meditation going. I always had something to do. I was waiting for the tea to brew. I get to drink the tea now. I get to be mindful about how does the tea feel? How hot is it? How does it taste? And I really came to appreciate that there is this moment. And yes, everything on the outside of my meditation feels like it's different, but this moment still feels like every other moment that I enjoyed my tea meditation. So that helped me come back to, I am alive. I'm so lucky to be alive.

Perspective.

Yes. So lucky to have the family that's still with me.

Yes.

And exercise, my first book, Healthy Brain, Happy Life, was all about the transformative effects of exercise on the brain. So after I meditate, I do my workout in the morning. And it was really one day I was doing my workout, it's a video workout, and the trainer said, It was a hard workout. And she said, you, know, In working out with great pain comes great wisdom.

Ooh, I love that.

And I was like, oh my God, that is what I need to hear, not just for working out. I have just gone through the worst pain in my whole life, and I do have more wisdom. That wisdom is based in the love that was left behind.

Yes.

And not just left behind, that sounds like it's leftovers.

The love.

That is here.

Yes.

You know, that's still here from my brother and my father. And that's when I started to think about this book, Good Anxiety in a Different Way. Because anxiety is an everyday kind of pain and suffering. that we all go through. And what if that leads to wisdom? What does that look like? And I needed as much wisdom and power that I needed. And so the book became searching for the power and the wisdom in everyday anxiety. It never would have been that if I hadn't had this event happen.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple podcast as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great. Thank you.