Neuroscientists REVEAL How To HEAL Your MIND | Lewis Howes

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, 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 means 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.

Right, right.

Now, that does not mean- Most people.

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

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

Dance together before you can get the whole system going.

So how do you get it to dance together? Exactly. So subjective, there is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful over states of mind and body. Thoughts happen spontaneously all the time. They're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection. But thoughts can also be deliberately introduced. For instance, right now, I can say, okay, have a thought that just decide to write your name and you can do that. I'm going to decide to write my name and you can do it. So that's a deliberate thought, which says that you can introduce thoughts. So I think it's very hard to control negative thoughts directly by trying to suppress them. Generally, they tend to just want to continue to geyser up all the time. But we can introduce a positive thought.

Can you think of two thoughts at the same time?

Probably not.

So you can only have one thought at a time.

Right, but they come very fast.

But it comes and goes. So you have to constantly be intentional and deliberate about what you think. Otherwise, and a spontaneous thought will pop back in. That's right. Based on your experience, based on sensory, based on how you're feeling or perceiving something, your environment, it's just going to keep popping in.

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.

Wow.

What a challenging thing. I don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts. 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, when 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'm capable of getting there eventually. The other is to attach a sense of reward to the effort process itself.

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

That's right. And if you look at true high performers, people that are consistently good at what they do, they don't peak and go through the postpartum depression and crash and come back and their life is a cycle of ups and downs, but really people who are on that upward trajectory consistently, those people attach dopamine to the effort process. And actually, Carol's one of her original studies on the discovery of growth mindset was these kids that loved doing math problems that they knew they couldn't get right. So it's like the people love puzzles, but in this case, they knew they couldn't get it right, but they 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.

Yeah.

Now, the Cool thing about dopamine is that it's very subjectively controlled. We can all learn to secrete dopamine in our brain in response to things that are in a purely subjective way.

Our interpretation.

Our interpretation. But it has to be attached to reality. So, one should never confuse- what is real?

Right.

So, if you're thinking about the effort you're expending, so let's say somebody right now is financially back on their heels. and they're setting up a new business, for instance. And it's hard. If they can take a few moments or minutes each day to reflect on the fact that the effort process is allowing them to climb out of their hole, potentially, that it's giving them an opportunity, that it's somehow they are on the right path or if they're not in movement along that path or at least oriented on the right path, they're not lying in bed all day.

They're taking a step.

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

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 write that email, every time you, let's say it's a person who's a craftsman or a crafts woman, every time you're working in the shop and doing that, every bit of effort you're taking a little bit of money out of this epinephrine account. You're spending epinephrine. At some point, those levels of epinephrine get high enough that you feel like quitting. It feels exhausted. 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.

Oh my gosh.

Epinephrine's climbing, climbing, climbing and eventually they quit. Now dopamine is able to push back on that epinephrine and give you anyone the feeling that you could continue and maybe even the feeling that you want to continue. And you've seen this actually, football is a good example, two teams play, say the Super Bowl, both teams are max effort the entire time.

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 have the energy.

They're 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.

If any, 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.

That's what gets us addicted because it feels so good.

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

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

That's right.

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

That's right. And if you think about, remember these neurochemical systems, adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, epinephrine, they weren't designed to keep us safe from tigers and to hunt and gather or to build Fortune 500 companies, they were designed to do anything. They were designed to be generic so that depending on our circumstances, we could adapt. So in an animal context, an animal that, let's say, is hunting or it needs food for its young, it's gonna feel agitation. That's stress. That's cortisol. It's like hunger. My babies might not eat. I might not eat. Maybe it's looking for a mate. It's gonna feel agitation and start looking and roaming and searching. 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 remind 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.

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

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 what's going on.

Maybe we need to be more emotional in a moment and not be chill and relax when there's an attack.

Maybe the moment is so big, man. 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, this ain't guaranteed, but it's also so much power and opportunity that if you're not in a good spot, like, tomorrow can be better, and if not tomorrow, then the month, or the year after, right? So emotional regulation, the shortcut. So now we're getting to like, is there a tip? 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.

LA freeways 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 mean?

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

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

You're breathing. Yeah.

Well, they're sitting there.

What are you seeing on the brain activity recordings?

The same thing that we see when we give Valium, which is an anxiolytic, their anxiety level goes down, their electricity goes 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. So 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 electrophysiological 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 a pace that works best? I mean, there's lots of different techniques of meditative breathing.

They found, you know, it doesn't, 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 it 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 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, 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-- 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.

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 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 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 your 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 just do. 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, you know, you track your levels. And I wanted to see for in terms of mental health and the neuro cycle that I've developed. I wanted to see the impact and I happened to be going through, experienced a very acute trauma in my family over December and in the moment of the trauma, I happened to see on my glucose monitor that my glucose had shot up to 240. Now that's heart attack level and I immediately managed my mind through the neuro cycle, which is the concept that I've developed, which is just a system anyone can learn it and I dropped my glucose levels within seconds back down to a normal level. And as it cycled up, it cycled, I could manage it. And if glucose is at that level, your cortisol's shot up at that level, your DHEA 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 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. Exactly. Isolate and fix. And then you're supposed to 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 the constant arguments or these, you know, they all have these toxic patterns or no one's immune. And the signals of those are things like depression and anxiety and those are simply telling you, hey, there's a pattern. It's either trauma based pattern or it's a toxic habit you've developed. But that pattern is actually putting your body under tremendous stress. Even to the point where your DNA is affected. And I showed in my research that, you know, if you think of the DNA ladder, if you pull out a chromosome, it looks like an X and where you see my fingernails, pink fingernails for those of you that are listening, the pink fingernails would then represent what we call telomeres. And telomeres are a proxy for how.

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

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, et cetera. But this shows that the energy levels levels in the brain are very flat blue means a very, very depressed. And this person was. Their narrative was tremendous. Torment 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, really to check out.

What page is this on?

This is on page.

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

I think you.

You've probably got it in black and white in that version that you've got the 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. Their ages were in this particular subject, and we had a group like this as well, they're similar. Their biological, chronological, the actual age was in their mid-30s. but their biological age is 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, it 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 still get depressed, but I know why and I know what to do. and there was changes in their behavior. They were back at work, they were back sleeping, 25% improvement in sleep. And I mean, all kinds of like their relationships, not suicidally 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 similar.

Like, you know, leafy greens and plant-based. Exactly, which is significant.

And also, there's been some work on meditation, but there's been no, no, I think this is the first study that's been it's been done on actually doing deliberate, intentional mind work to change. And then we saw significant drops as well in information markers and blood markers. And, but the biggest thing was their narrative, the person's story. So if we go away from the biology for a minute and we, and we listen to the person's story, that person was offline. They were online. They were living again. And even though, and they had also had this, this, this acceptance. And this is what I wanted to kind of circle back to when we 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 we must suppress, like cancer symptoms you must suppress. So it's been lumped or misery 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.

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

And that'll 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 a, they've been looking for the neurobiological correlates. They've been looking for where in the brain is depression. And for years, you'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 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 as medicine has advanced and technology has advanced, so we've become very caught up in the quick fix. But life's not like that, mind is not like that, mind is separate from brain and body. You can apply that kind of thinking, not quick fix, but you can apply a symptomatic diagnosis treatment approach to body, to physical brain and body. But when it comes to mind, that's that there's this gravitational field, this force, this think, feel, 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 going to 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 bond, 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, a pandemic, we all know that everyone's going on about the next pandemic is mental health. Mental health has always been an issue. Notice from the beginning of time, mankind has battled with life, with issues, with death, with fighting, with war, with whatever. So mental health's not on the rise. but the mismanagement of mental health, making it a disease has created a whole new problem. So here we sit with before the pandemic, they started doing a population study in the mid 90s and this is when I was still practicing early days of my practicing sort of 10 years into my work and I started seeing this trend of and I was watching the study where people were the decades long trend of people living longer. So we know we all hear this message, 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 are dropping down dead like flies. And it's considered deaths of despair by preventable lifestyle diseases. So we have to look at the lifestyle disease means that there's something in our body that's that's weaker. Why lifestyle, which is mind driven, how am I eating, drinking, sleeping. But more than that is what's my mind behind all of that? How am I actually managing the day-to-day moments? How am I managing the patterns, the traumas, the established toxic habits? What am I doing about that stuff? And that's when we ignore all of that, because this current trend of science is saying, oh, those don't matter. What matters is the symptoms. Let's just look for the symptoms. Checklist, diagnose, label. When you label someone, you chop, you chop up to 10 years more of their life. you know, it's like it's adding on, they've shown studies of people with a mental health diagnosis have chopped their 20 years off, up to 20 years off their lifespan. People on psychotropic drugs because of all the complications and the changes in the brain and the body chopping up to 25 years of their life. I mean, this is serious. So here we have this already existing, then the pandemic hits. Now another year, 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 who are depressed. 100% of people are depressed and anxious and concerned about this COVID pandemic. 100% of people in the world at some point in their life have and will be anxious and depressed and in grief and sadness and terror and despair and one of the others A large percentage of the population, and I'm not sure the exact percentage because no one's really done this kind of research, but estimates, it's probably 30-40% of people will have extreme trauma from abuse, war trauma, that kind of stuff where they'll go down the continuum to sort of the -19, 819, if you look at a continuum of 0 to 10, 0 to -10, and have things like psychotic breaks and hearing voices and extreme states of distress, mental distress, which are still not diseases. they are simply in that traumatic situation, you're having a traumatic response. Think of someone who's a war vet. I just interviewed a Navy SEAL the other day who was trained snipers. And I mean, the things that he had to do and that his teams had to do, you know, they come back and try and, we all know the problem of trying to, you know, reconcile back into civilian life after you've gone through. I mean, you know, this is what they'd be experiencing all day long, stuff that's completely against survival, completely against our human nature. And now they, instead of them being allowed 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 they 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 is, that's just going to add fuel to the fire because your mind's got to work through the brain. So now you put chemicals in and now that's not going to facilitate change. We have to do something. So it's like a narrative.

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

Or is that... That's a result of... Go ahead. The narrative of I have a chemical imbalance and my depression is from chemical imbalance is a narrative that is the only explanation that people have been given. They're not given an alternative reaction, I mean an alternative narrative. So the most important thing is that anyone listening to this podcast, I want to validate your depression, your anxiety, your grief, your despair, your PTSD, whatever label you've been given, I want you to, I want to validate that that doesn't need to be validated with a disease label. You're not diseased, you're not a broken brain. 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 like 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 and PTSD or I had 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 DNA and your telomeres and 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, the 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 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? 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 have a sort of human experiencing life. We're supposed to be at Y and you put the two together and what the current treatment says is that okay now we're going to create Z. We're just going to ignore X and Y. We're going to create a new thing and that new thing is you're diseased. But that doesn't work. It's actually X plus Y equals XY. X is what you're going through. Y is where you want to find mental peace. 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.

Just like any skill or anything you learn, you gotta go from thinking to doing to being. You gotta take knowledge, you create the experience, and if you keep doing it over and over again, you start getting a skill or you start getting wise about how to do it. And you know that you know how how to do it. Well, in the last 10 years, we have assembled a scientific team. And let's see if you can really make significant brain changes. I don't want those changes to just be in your mind. I want them to be in your brain. I want to be able to see before and after pictures to say that person has a significant change after a traumatic brain injury or anxiety or depression. or a cyclic mood disorder or a stroke. We want to see that there's been significant change. At the same time, let's measure your brain in real time and let's look to see what that transformation process looks like. And in the discovery, Louis, of that process, we gained so much knowledge about what that transformational process looks like. In other words, I can tell you without a doubt that if you're analyzing your life, right now within some disturbing emotion that 100% of the time you're going to make your brain worse.

Think about your life.

If you're stuck in an emotion like you're frustrated, you're angry, you're fearful, resentful and you're thinking within that emotional state. In other words, you can't think greater than how you feel. That means then you were thinking in the past because those emotions are a record or residue of the past. We see people in the process of change that are analyzing in duality or polarity. That kind of drives the brain into higher states of arousal and further away from true change. We've done thousands and thousands and thousands of brain scans, and we now know that there's a formula to create greater brain coherence, greater brain efficiency to make your brain work better. And when your brain works better, you work better. At the same time, it requires a clear intention and an elevated emotion to begin to change your energy and to change your life. And nobody changes until they change their energy.

Right?

So then how do you get a person out of resentment, frustration into joy and freedom? If why would they feel grateful or joyful or free if the experience hasn't happened? so most people are spending the majority of their life waiting for something out there to take away their emptiness or pain or the resentment in here. Well, if they're waiting their whole life in separation or lack, then and we create reality, then the lack is driving certain thoughts which is creating more separation and more lack. So teaching people then to begin to condition their body emotionally before the evidence takes place in their life is breaking a significant habit. So instead of living by cause and effect, now we're beginning to cause and effect. The moment you start feeling whole and grateful, we now know your healing will begin at that moment. The moment you start feeling worthy and abundant, your wealth is coming. You're generating a certain amount of energy, a certain amount of wealth.

How does someone feel worthy though if they've always been told they're not worth it.

Yeah. Well, so let me see.

Oh, that's the story they tell themselves.

Yeah.

Like, I'm not worth it because she didn't say yes when I asked her on a date. Because he broke up with me because I got fired, because my parents left me. How am I worth it when there's so much evidence or story around a negative thing?

Well, let's stop telling the story of your past and let's start telling the story of your future. And people who aren't defined by a vision of the future, for the most part are left with memories of the past. Your brain is a record of the past. It's an artifact of everything you've learned and experienced in this moment. So most people wake up in the morning and they start thinking about their problems. And those problems are memories that are tattooed in the brain that are associated to certain people and things at certain times and places. So the moment the person wakes up clean slate, they start thinking about their problems. They're thinking in the past. if you believe your thoughts have something to do with your destiny, well, there's a possibility that your past is going to be your future. Every one of those problems has an emotion associated with it. So then the moment you start recalling the problem, you start feeling unhappy. Now your body's in the past because thoughts are the language of the brain and feelings are the language of the body. And how you think and how you feel creates a state of being. So people reaffirm their identity. based on the past, right? And it turns out that the redundancy of doing that, conditioning only requires an image and an emotion. Most people are unconsciously conditioning their body into the familiar past, into the known. So now if you're in the familiar past and in the known, you're going to crave the predictable future, right? That's the known as well. There's only one place where the unknown exists and that's the eternal present moment. That's the sweet spot of the generous present moment. So you've got to labor to get that person beyond the emotions that keep them tacked or anchored to the past. And yes, it takes an effort to do that, but if you keep working with the formula, you'll reach that elegant moment where there's a liberation of energy. And now your body, as the unconscious mind, the objective mind is not believing it's living in the same past experience 24 hours a day because you're liberating the body from that emotional state. So you ask the person, why are you so unhappy? Why are you so frustrated? Why are you so resentful? The moment you ask that, their brain is going to associate that emotion to a past event.

To a memory.

To a memory. That's because they have nothing to look forward to in their future. So if you're not being defined by a vision of the future, it just means to me that you're more in love with your past. than you are with the future. So how do you teach people to believe in a future that they can't see or experience with their senses yet, but they've thought about enough times in their mind that their brain is literally changed to look like the event has already occurred. The latest research in neuroscience says that's absolutely possible. We know that. And how do you teach a person to select a new possibility in their future and begin to emotionally embrace that future before it's made manifest to such a degree that their body is their unconscious mind is believing it's living in that future reality in the present moment and they're signaling new genes and new ways ahead of the environment. Now to their body begins to change to look like the event has already occurred. We've proven that that's possible. Now think about this.

So the more you think about your desired future, the joy, the gratitude, attitude, the feelings you want to have that are more positive, the more you think about it as a future thing happening, the more your body shifts now.

Exactly. So your body is believing it's living in that future reality in the present moment. Now think about this, some condition in your life, the more altered you feel inside of you, the more you narrow your focus on the cause and the brain freezes an image and takes a snapshot. and that memory now is embossed in the brain. It's branded in there. So then people think neurologically within the circuits of those past experiences and they feel chemically within the boundaries of those emotions. And the stronger the betrayal, the stronger the trauma, the more the body's living in the past, right? So then, so how do you reverse that? So now, if you truly got passionate about a future, we've all done this, you get a wild idea in your mind. and you start holding on to that vision and you're preoccupied with it, all of a sudden the thought in your mind becomes the experience and you start feeling the energy of the future. Now, the stronger the emotion you feel from that vision, the more you're going to pay attention to the picture in your mind and now you're remembering your future.

And vice versa, the stronger you pay attention to the feeling of the past pain, you're going to create the pain in this moment.

Exactly. So then, so it requires a coherent brain. And we now know that there's a formula for that and we've got beautiful research to show that people can do it. They just have to practice. And it requires a coherent heart because resentment, frustration, and patience creates a very incoherent heart. And when that heart becomes incoherent, you stop trusting yourself. There's no energy there. You stop trusting in your future. So then if there's physical evidence in your brain and body, physical evidence to look like the event has already occurred. It's quite possible you'll be thinking neurologically within the circuits of your future and you'll begin to feel chemically within the boundaries of that emotion of your future and how you think and how you feel as your state of being. And now your state of being is living in the future instead of the past. Now, the moment you disconnect from the emotion of your future because traffic or some co-worker or your ex or whatever people come up with. Now you're back to the energy of your past and now you're going to start looking for it, analyzing why hasn't it happened? Well, if you're feeling the emotion of your future, why would you look for it? Because you would feel like it already happened and that is the place where the magic happens. So then you can't just do this, get up and then return back to your old state of being. You got to maintain that modified stayed in my apartment.

When practice happens.

Well, let me finish.

If I punch you in the face right now, how do you maintain?

Well, of course, of course. I mean, we all take blows in our lives and we all react emotionally. But the question is, how long are you gonna react? So then, if you can't mediate and regulate your emotional reactions, and those emotions linger for days, that's a mood for some people. Mood, and then months, Temperament years personality trait. So then the person's personality is literally based on the past. But they don't know that because they're doing it over and over again. It becomes a subconscious program. So now if it requires a coherent brain and a coherent heart, then we have to train people how to self-regulate. So we've done thousands and thousands of measurements. We've partnered with the HeartMath Institute. to teach people how to create and sustain heart coherence.

How do we do it? Well, besides going to your workshop, what's the simplified version? I'm sure it takes more time than...

Well, it really doesn't. It really doesn't. It just requires getting still, closing your eyes, putting your attention on your heart, changing your breath so that you move into the present moment, and when you slow your breathing down, you slow your brainwaves. when you slow your brain waves down, now you're accessing your autonomic nervous system. So then you train a person how to open their heart and feel an elevated emotion and it takes a little practice and just like a flower that takes time to bloom, it takes a little bit of time. But if you work in trading the resentment, the frustration or the impatience for gratitude, appreciation and thankfulness and you keep at it, they'll come a moment where that system switches on and now you're feeling grateful for no reason at all. That's not a bad thing because gratitude, the emotional signature of gratitude means something's happening to you, something has happened to you, you're receiving something or you just received something. So your body then when you're feeling gratitude is in the perfect state of receiving. So then that means then you'll accept believe in surrender to the thoughts equal to the emotional state of gratitude. If you're living in resentment, you're living in fear, you're living in impatience, you could say, I'm healthy, I'm healthy, I'm healthy, I'm wealthy, I'm wealthy, I'm wealthy, and with all you want, and that.

Thought'S going to stop right at the.

Brainstem and never make its way to the body because the body... You're not feeling it or because why? Because you're feeling resentment. And that thought isn't... That thought is not consistent with the emotion of resentment. Resentment has a different set of thoughts, right? In other words, once you start opening your heart, it begins to move into coherence. It begins to produce a measurable magnetic field up to three meters wide. Now that's frequency, that's energy. And all that energy, that frequency carries information, carries an intent. So then when you're feeling gratitude and your heart is open, you're broadcasting energy into the field.

Frequency.

A frequency. You lay the intent of the thought of your health or your wealth. That frequency can carry the thought of your wealth. It can carry the thought of your health. If you're suffering, you can't... Suffering does not carry... that energy does not carry the thought of your wealth. It carries a different set of thoughts. So then we're teaching people how to self-regulate because if you're going to believe in that future that you're imagining with all of your heart, it better be open and activated. And you better know how to self-regulate and you have to know the moment you disconnect from the energy of your future because of some circumstance in your life and you lose that feeling, if you're practicing it on a daily basis with your eyes closed, then the next levels to be able to open your eyes and do it right in the moment and be able to self-regulate and change the frustration from some experience in your life back to the energy of your future. Now, that requires great awareness and great effort. But if you have a community of people that are practicing this on a daily basis and they're connected to their future because that's where their mind is, they begin to want the future more than the emotions of the past. So we've done enough measurements now, Louis, to know that we can teach people how to do that and we have evidence that people can sustain it for 45 minutes to an hour. It's a skill now. They know that they know how to do it. So now they have brain coherence and heart coherence. Well, once the heart begins to become orderly and coherent, it acts as an amplifier and it drives energy to the brain. so now the brain is getting more energy once the heart is open and then you're thinking a different set of thoughts and those thoughts produce different chemicals for you to feel more of that and here comes nitric oxide from oxytocin and then all of a sudden your heart literally starts to swell.

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 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 saying, 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 feelings 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 interactions they had.

Interesting. Do you, is there any research on if men or women are more anxious? Is there any research around this? If 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 all 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 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 ladies here, raise your hand if you have a girlfriend or girlfriends 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 like, it feels great to be.

Able to share this.

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. Maybe one or two guys out of hundreds would raise their hand. 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.

Yes.

And I say, okay, I go back to the ladies in the room and 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 in the room. They never share these things. 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. And I feel like 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, It's when we share, whatever it is, even if it's 5-10 minutes, it decreases the stress and the anxiety. It seems like it goes down. And I feel like we gotta create better friendships or relationships or therapists or whatever that we can connect to and have that consistent communication stream. Because otherwise, when we hold on to it, just bad things happen.

Yeah, 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 mean, 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.

Right.

That was associated around something negative.

Yeah.

Yeah.

For them. And so you learn in order to fit in, to wall yourself or to not share.

Yeah.

The things that people won't like about you. And I'm not saying that's okay. And I. And we all have our responsibilities.

Yeah.

But as young boys growing up when we're conditioned that way, it was hard to break that for me personally. Yeah. And it took me a long time until I realized like, wow, this isn't working for me.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

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, workshops and all that stuff, but and just healthier relationships in general.

Yeah.

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.

That's beautiful.

I'm trying to bring other men on.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

Hopefully, I can start to do this with my own life or maybe with my girlfriend or my guy friend.

Yeah.

Try to have some of these conversations, but I just think it's challenging in general. Yeah. It's challenging when you're younger and you're trying to have a few friends and.

They don't accept it.

Yeah, exactly.

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.

Yeah.

So it's, it's really challenging.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

This is, I mean, we're going off another topic here.

Yeah.

We're going off another topic here for another conversation. But as an academic, as a neuroscientist, 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 unfortunately lost your father and your brother around the same time.

Yeah.

And while you were writing the book, and so you had to kind of shift some of the stuff right in 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 and how you emotionally had to navigate it when maybe you didn't have the answers?

Yeah.

And 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 unexpected.

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 loss, grief, sadness.

Loss, grief, sadness. It was so-- Anger, 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've had inklings of in the past, but never to this 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. That helped me come back to, I am alive. I'm so lucky to be alive.

Perspective.

Yeah, so lucky to have the family that's still with me.

Yes, 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.

Can you tell us why our thought around stress is more important than the stress itself?

Yeah. So I do try to avoid the language of like, if you think about stress the wrong way, it will kill you. In part because I actually came to regret that I had done a lot of teaching and speaking and writing about how stress itself can kill you. So because I'm a health psychologist, I was trained to view stress as the enemy. And if you look at the science, you can find evidence that stress increases your risk of everything people don't want from heart disease to depression, all of it. But almost 10 years ago, I came across this study that made me really rethink stress. and it was a study that tracked about 30,000 adults for almost a decade in the US. And at the beginning of the study, they asked people, first, how stressful is your life? And then also, do you believe that your stress is harmful? Do you believe that stress is bad for your health? And so they followed them to find out, like, is it true that stress kills? And what they found is that for the subset of people who had a very stressful life and most strongly believed that their stress was harmful, they had a 43% increased risk of dying from any cause over the next decade. But the people who had the most stressful lives and did not strongly believe that stress was bad for them, they were the most likely to be alive at the end of the decade. And this study caught my attention because First of all, it suggests that stress is not always the enemy. At least it's not always a risk factor in the way that we think about it. But then also it was making me think like how many of those deaths was I personally responsible for by going out there trying to convince people that stress was bad for their health and that, you know, the stress will kill your brain cells and eventually kill you. So that was kind of like a wake up moment for me to start to want to investigate is it possible that how you think about stress can interact with stress to help you avoid some of the consequences we don't want? And maybe even something good about stress worth embracing so that your mindset could help you harness some of your personal strengths, help you harness the strength in your community to get some positive outcomes we maybe don't usually associate with stress. So I think I'm trying to get from the idea that like stress isn't bad unless you believe it is, which is sometimes how my work gets summarized. That's not the case. I mean, like you said, I'm a scientist, so, you know, I understand data. Stress is a paradox. Stress is not something that we often get to choose. So it's not like even if you had a wish list and you could say, I want this much stress and this type of stress, it's not like we have that opportunity. So what I'm really interested in is this idea that we now call the stress mindset effect, that there are ways of thinking about stress that can make your body's response to stress healthier, that can change what happens in your brain in moments of stress that make you braver, more resilient, more willing to accept help from others, and that these mindsets basically change the trajectory of how stress affects you. That's the big idea that I hope to share with people.

When do we know that we are experiencing good stress versus bad stress?

Yeah. No such thing as good stress or bad stress, I want to say. That is, again, another, I think, a big misconception around stress. because, you know, people will say things like, oh, good stress. It's like the stress of getting a promotion or the stress of winning the lottery or the stress of doing something really exciting that you're good at. You're like, that's good stress. Bad stress is all the stuff we don't want. It's the pain, it's the suffering, it's the loss, it's the uncertainty, it's what we actually mean when we say we're stressed. It's all of that. So I, you know, forget good stress, bad stress, because it sets us up to think that if we're experiencing what all of us will instinctively say, didn't want this, like the bad stress, that's the real stress for most of us. And again, most of us don't get to choose how stressful our lives are, how stressful the world is. I mean, the time we're living in now is a perfect example of that. And if you label things good stress, bad stress, it can lead to things like believing, let's say you're trying to homeschool your kids right now, and it's enormously stressful, and you're feeling like a bad parent and a bad teacher and you can't figure out how you're gonna get through today, let alone tomorrow, if you believe that's bad stress, you're gonna believe, I'm not cut out to be a parent. There's something wrong with my kids. There's something wrong with my life. And I just like, let's, no. Here's the distinction that I like to make. Life can be difficult, so that good or bad, but stress is what arises in you when something that you care about is at stake. So it's your thoughts, it's your emotions, it's your biology, it's the stress hormones, it's the adrenaline, it's your desire to reach out to others, it's sometimes a sense of outrage and anger, it's all the stuff that emerges to help you meet a moment that matters. And so what I like to focus on is in moments of stress, some of those instincts are going to be healthy and helpful and others are not. So rather than like stress being good or bad, it's about learning more about your stress responses the repertoire that's available to you? And how do you get good at stress so that you can tell in a moment of stress, is this a moment that requires slowing down and going within? Or is this a moment that requires being vulnerable and asking for help? Is this a moment that requires ignoring everything else and rising to the challenge because it's an emergency and I need that adrenaline to let to do it? There's a lot of different ways to be good at stress and that's the good that I like to focus on.

Yeah, I'm a big believer that our life is an interpretation and the language we use dictates the way we think and feel and the more we say, I'm stressed, I'm overwhelmed, any word that we use after I am, we start to manifest more in the mind and the body and they connect and we create that. I'm sick, I'm not feeling well. The more we say these things, now we should be aware of these things, and not just act like it's not there. But I think when we use language and almost eliminating the word stress or overwhelm and reframing it can be a powerful thing as well. What is your thoughts on how we use words around our stress, anxiety, loneliness, depression? How should we be using words and language during that time?

There are a lot of examples that I can go into, but I want to start from an overview. this is where that improv idea of yes, and can be really helpful. Because, and I know you've talked with other guests about this too, sometimes there's a tendency to want to be so positive that we ignore reality. And, you know, one of the things is, one of the reasons that I'm drawn to the research that I do and the topics that I talk about is because it is not in my nature to be positive, right?

So anytime you're a negative person.

Pessimistic, anxious, overwhelmed, existential dread, terrified by life from birth.

The world is against you.

Yeah.

Yeah, and not because necessarily life experiences that have shaped that worldview. I believe a lot in genetics also. So I think that's my temperament. So I'm drawn a lot to these ideas of choosing positive emotions, reframing things, because it's the antidote to my habits that can become destructive. So I think part of this is that's another way, you could introduce me to somebody who needs to seriously come to terms with the reality of suffering and I'd push them in the opposite direction. And, you know, oh no, I'm never stressed. Oh, everything happens for a reason. I want to be like, I would want to ground them in the opposite that is also true. So, but let's get back to the idea because there is some truth to positive language and mindsets. A really simple example, we know that the physiology of anxiety and excitement are really similar in your body and in your brain. And if you were to take someone who's feeling really anxious, measure their heart rate, look at the ratio of stress hormones that are coursing through their bloodstream, and you look at someone who's really excited, they're almost identical. One of my favorite studies was actually they had people jumping out of airplanes, and some people were terrified, and some people were like, this is what I live for. Physiology looked exactly the same, right? The only difference is the story that they were telling themselves about this experience, you know, whether they felt capable of it. And so there's research suggesting that in moments of anxiety, even if truly you're anxious, you're not excited in that moment, say to yourself, all right, well my heart is pounding. This means my heart is in it. My heart is giving me energy to meet this moment. and you could try saying to yourself, like, I'm here for this. Or whatever your version of, if saying I'm excited feels like too far, just I like to say my heart is in it, which is a step from anxiety towards excitement.

Yeah, it's not about lying to yourself or faking it till you make it. It's about saying, okay, my body is getting ready for this. I can feel my body in this.

Moment, so let's roll. To subtly shift their physiology in a way that actually is a little bit healthier than like a fight or flight response.

Yeah.

So, you know, you're pouring their favor against Yeah. It's yeah, you get more energy, less inflammation in your body. You're starting to move towards a stress state that really is just helping you have energy and courage and enjoy the moment. And it also increases positive emotions like confidence and enthusiasm. It makes you better able to connect with other people, too. I mean, there are studies that do a similar kind of mindset reset for people who are about to enter a stressful conversation. And like, you know, one of my favorite studies, I found that people made more eye contact and they were more likely to mimic the other person's body language in this really natural way that helps build rapport just by reframing their anxiety as energy that they could harness as a sign that they care. So that's one example. And that's a far cry from something like saying, this is good for me, therefore it is. There's something, these resets are pretty specific because they're grounded in biological reality. I'll give you one other example. One of the biological things that often happens when we're stressed is changes in our brain and in the hormones in our body that make us lonely. And you can start to feel really alone. And what most people don't recognize is that is your, just like when your heart is pounding, it's your body trying to give you energy to act. When you feel lonely, that's your brain and your body trying to get you to connect. It is making you hungry for support, for connection, for allies, for teamwork and cooperation. And so it produces like a hunger for social contact and community. And too often people feel that loneliness and what they think is, it's because I'm alone, it's because no one understands, it's because I'm the only one. And they mistake what the signal is and they tell themselves a story that actually makes them further withdraw. So that's another type of like stress signal that when you understand what's happening in your biology, you can embrace it and say, this is a sign to reach out.

Wow. So when we feel lonely, we shouldn't continue being lonely. We should actually reach out and create connection and not say, no one's going to understand my pain right now, so I'm going to stay in my bed for two weeks and watch Netflix alone and get more depressed.

That's not the solution.

Yeah.

Often the, you know, it's interesting. I mean, this is sort of speaking more broadly as a psychologist, I often find that the beliefs that people tell themselves that are most painful are almost always, it's just telling you what you care about. Like, when you're telling yourself a story about being alone and lonely, what you're actually revealing is, like, you know, people care about you and you need to reach out. Like, you need your people, you need your community.

No one's really thought, I've never really thought about it that way and saying, like, if I feel lonely, it means people care about me. and I need to reach out because they want to get connected too.

Your body and brain, they aren't stupid. If nobody cared about you, you wouldn't actually experience a desire for community and contact. The brain is very interesting. It's like, you know, it's funny with depression, often one of the most insidious things about it is depression will actually start to lie to you and it will start to tell you there's nothing you can do and there's nobody who cares and you actually have a very suppressed stress response. And I don't mean you're not suffering, but stress is, you know, it's a physiological thing and it often involves hormones and energy and brain activity that is trying to push you in the direction of meeting life. And when you're depressed, you actually stop feeling like there's anything that you can do to meet this moment or that there are other people who could help you and support you. And like that's, that's what's so insidious and ugly about depression is it's a lie. If you're not in that state, you can really start to read a lot of these signals that we experience as difficult emotions or annoying physiological symptoms of stress as actually pointing you to the strengths that you have and how you can respond and what you need in this moment.

What's the reason for depression for human beings? Why does it happen to so many people? when it doesn't feel like there's a good purpose for it. What is that reason?

There are a lot of theories about this. I won't say that I know any of them to be better than other theories, but I do subscribe to the idea that you wouldn't see something in humanity that has no purpose. So a lot of the things that we experience as not something we would choose for ourselves, things like grief, anxiety, depression, anger, they serve a function. So one of the thoughts is that depression in its sort of initial form is meant to help you conserve energy and withdraw from reactivity and giving away of your energy and attention so that you can kind of pull back, slow down, pause, and process what's happening in your life. And that's, you know, psychologists sometimes call that like reactive depression. It's normal, it's typical when things in your life are difficult.

You feel completely overwhelmed, completely stressed. People don't understand you and you're just like, okay, I need to take a.

Break to actually reflect on what's happening in my life. Almost in the way that if you were running an ultra marathon, you get tired and your body work and brain work very hard to convince you to slow down and take a break. because it's in your best interest. Now, so that's one theory. Another theory, which I find very plausible, is that depression is the equivalent of what you see in animals called the defeat response. And this is if you are an animal in the wild, and you experience so much rejection from your community, your family, your group, so you've been ostracized, you have very little access to resources on your own, you can't find a way to survive on your own, you will see these changes happen in the brain and body that they're called the defeat response, but it's this biological cascade that basically convinces animals to crawl away and die, to give up on life. And so if you stress out rat enough by say putting them in a cage with a bunch of rats that bully that rat incessantly and the rat can do nothing to escape and you're not giving it resources and it's got no purpose in life, you will see changes in that rat's brain and biology that then if you throw the rat in a bucket of water it doesn't even try to swim. It just gives up and drowns. So I think that a lot of what we experience as depression and why depression is an epidemic in so many cultures right now, so many societies, is that a lot of people are experiencing kind of the equivalent of being in a cage and being bullied and not being clear about what can I do to improve my circumstances? Who cares about me? How can I contribute to the world? And I'm not saying it's necessarily true. I mean, you can feel that way. Even when something is possible, right? That's part of how like, and sometimes it actually is true. Like sometimes you really are in circumstances that can trigger a defeat response. I think that's another reason why depression might exist, in which case it's doing nothing for you. And that's, I mean, it's worth knowing that depression can make your brain turn on you because the depression is not thinking about your well-being.

No, that's crazy. What do you think are the three or four things that can help us get out of a depressed state of being? whether it's been for weeks, months, years, or moments.

Yeah. Well, here I will go to both the science and my direct experience. One of my big interests in life is helping people who find themselves in circumstances they would not have chosen for themselves. And grief is a big one.

Yeah.

Or trauma. So what the science says and what I have seen in people's lives in my own life is if you're on a do-it-yourself path. So first of all, let me say, obviously you use whatever resources are available to you therapeutically and medically. Now that's not my role. So I don't write prescriptions. I don't do therapy. So I'm not out there in the world sharing that with people. But obviously everything from antidepressants to new treatments like deep brain stimulation and a magnetic stimulation of the brain, therapy, group therapy, one-on-one, all of that stuff. obviously use that and I believe in the power of sort of all of the evidence-based treatments. Okay, but I don't know how to do it, so I'm not out there sharing it. So if you're on a do-it-yourself supportive pathway in addition to or instead of that other stuff, exercise, number one. And I know how that sounds to somebody who is depressed. I know because I've actually been in the state where I where it was so hard to move, I would have punched someone who told me to exercise if I had the strength to punch someone who told me to exercise. So I understand what it can be like to be in a physical state of depression or grief, where every cell in your motor system is saying, don't move, making it impossible to even get to put one foot in front of the other. That said, there is nothing else you can do that more dramatically and profoundly changes your brain chemistry immediately and in the long term to relieve depression, whether we are talking about the brain chemistry that kicks in, the adrenaline and the dopamine that just gives you a little bit of energy, even if you're depressed, that tends to kick in immediately to over time, as your brain learns how to benefit from exercise, you will start to get an exercise high that, you know, gives you high levels of endocannabinoids and dopamine and endorphins that just transform your outlook. on like the day that you exercise. And then six weeks, eight weeks, months later, you see changes in the structure of the brain that can only be compared to what you see from the most cutting edge neurological treatments for depression, things like deep brain stimulation. So yeah, that exercise actually changes your reward system, the structure and function of your reward system in ways that can help it recover from depression or addiction, which can absolutely wreak havoc and the brain's ability to experience joy and anticipate pleasure and stay motivated. Depression, grief, and addiction are all, it's like they all have a very similar effect on the brain's ability to experience positive motivation and take joy in everyday life. And exercise is, as far as I can tell, because I looked for it in the research, as far as I can tell, it's the only thing that you can choose to do that has that kind of impact on your brain in the long term.

Wow.

That's number one. I could keep going, but you.

Want.

To give me a couple of others.

Okay. Number two, this is going to sound super cheesy, but I believe this is find a way to be of service to others. I mean, the research really supports this as well. But if you think about, you know, we talked about depression as being possibly, for some people, it's like a defeat response where you've had experiences in life, that have misled you into believing that you don't have value or that you aren't cared about, or there's nothing you can do to make a difference in your life or in the world. And the fastest way to get contradictory evidence is to volunteer to help someone in life when I was struggling, where I re-engaged with not just like donating money when I can, but to show up to a place and help people First was when I was in graduate school and was working in a food kitchen and preparing food and serving food. And then later on, starting to work as an adoptions counselor for animal rescue organizations, where I would actually go and adopt out animals who otherwise might be homeless or even euthanized. When you do that, the thing that is so great about helping others or volunteering is people see you differently in that role. There already was in you that good. Like whatever good is in you, often when you're in a situation of being able to help others, it just gets reflected back to you. And the same thing is true for me. I always say, my students like me so much more than like my family members. There's something about a role where you're trying to help others, where they see you differently.

They appreciate you more.

It's such a gift if you have a voice in your head that says you have nothing to offer, nobody cares about you, there's no good in the world. Because you get this sort of reciprocity where you tap into your desire to do good. You see, first of all, that you aren't the only one suffering. That's another great thing about helping others is it makes visible what might other people are struggling with food scarcity. How many other people are struggling with addiction, whatever capacity you're able to volunteer or serve in. you start to realize you aren't alone. Even if that struggle is different than your own, you see the common humanity of it. And again, that people see the good in you. So I'm sure that sounds cheesy, but I'm gonna stand in the truth of that. And not only that, I mentioned this in my TED Talk. So of course you can always find studies showing that stressful life circumstances are bad for your health. So if you lose your job, if you get divorced, if you experience trauma. Could that increase your risk of physical health problems, diseases, new mental health challenges?

Yes.

But there are these studies showing that if you are someone who regularly volunteers or you have a caregiving role that is not in and of itself a major source of stress. I mean, there are caregiving roles that are enormously stressful. But if you're able to give care in a way that is not that extreme, that those events don't take the same toll on your physical or mental health. There are studies showing that literally you can get fired or get divorced and you would expect it to cause all sorts of problems for your health and your mental health. And that trend or that effect disappears in relation of people who are regularly giving back to their communities or providing care to others. So there is lots of great research.

It's powerful.

And then the third thing I will say is, you and I were talking about this before we went live, is rescue an animal. Because one of the only things that can really help, again, beyond get on the right antidepressant medication if that's for you, but one of the things that can help in any given moment that is incredibly helpful for depression or grief or trauma is to have a relationship with an animal. who depends on you, and who you can have that success experience of providing the care that they need. And actually, in many of my books, I've written about research studies done with groups of people who are healed through their relationships of providing care to animals, including people who experienced enormous childhood trauma and came to view themselves as essentially broken. or unlovable, rejected, and then to then go out and adopt or train an animal who was going to be euthanized because it was violent or it was rejected or it was abandoned. And that you, you know, in providing that care and you see the enormous beauty and wonder in that animal and they see it in you.

Wow.

That's your three tips.

You know, it's interesting. Would you have a fourth one?

So I can tell you what my own research has looked at in the past decade is meditation.

Every word you say is a blueprint that your mind, body and psyche are working to make your reality. So we make our thoughts and our thoughts make us, then we go out into the world and we justify our thoughts every day. But our words are a blueprint and when you know that you think, well I better pay attention to that blueprint. you print. I better not say this kid is killing me. My job is making me want to die. I'm so stressed out by what? The queue in Hughes Market. Well go to Zimbabwe where there is no Hughes Market and there is no queue and there's no money to buy food anyway. Then you can say you're stressed because your problem, the queue in error one and the bill, is someone else's fantasy dream come true. This Freeway is killing you. You have a car.

You have a car.

Look at the people on four buses. I used to take my daughter to school and I'm on one day thinking that, oh my God, this commute is hell. And I saw someone at a bus and thought, how lucky, I'm in my car. I've got the heating, I've got a cup of tea, I've got an hour to listen to something. I can talk to my kid. I keep saying, I want an hour to myself. Well, here it is. And I learned to stop doing that. but when you say how are you? Nightmare. It is torture.

What?

The traffic. Yeah, the traffic, the queue, people keep ringing me, the phone ringing, it's torture. Well, maybe if it didn't ring, that might be worse. Some of my clients who are models will say my life is hell because people look at me. It's like really? Well, one day they won't and then you might miss it. Yeah, but I get on a plane and guys hit on me, it's a nightmare. Well, put on a baseball cap. and glasses readable, then they leave you alone. But that's not a nightmare, it's just mildly inconvenient. It's not hell, it's not killing you. But we use these incredible words. This is torture, this is killing me, this is a disaster. What is? Well, I went to the bathroom and I forgot to pause my movie. That's not a disaster. But when you use those words, because your mind can't differentiate just to feel like it really is a disaster.

The flip side of this, the beautiful part, when we understand and appreciate that.

Our thoughts become reality, we can create.

The life of our dreams as well. We can start to manifest our thoughts by visualizing, by telling ourselves what we want, who we want to become, and taking those actions toward it. We can manifest our dreams.

You really can. You can stop being ill, you can change the shape of your body, you can change your digestion, you can have physical things, you can change the way you interact with your kids, so here's a good example, my kid is a nightmare, change that to my child is age appropriate.

There you go.

This builder's going to go, oh my god, that's a disaster. But a good builder will go, it's a challenge. When you said talking to girls is terrifying, you just change that is challenging. But hey, there's hundreds of girls out there. There's a numbers game. One will say yes, one will say no. And even if they say no, the only risk in life is not to take the risk. That's the risk. If you don't, when you take the risk and it goes wrong, you learn something.

It gives you feedback for how to show up differently the next time. My girlfriend's a doctor of physical therapy and when she works on people, she would agree with everything you're saying because people's bodies are so tight, not because of something they tore or something sore, but it's because they're holding on to something emotionally. And she says once they start to talk, their bodies relax.

Yeah.

And the pain goes away. Yeah. All the pain where they can't lift.

Their shoulder, they can't turn their neck.

Once they let it out, their feelings. Yeah. About their relationship or the insecurities or whatever it may be.

Yeah.

That's when they have a pain-free body.

Because the body keeps score. The body holds on to pain and stress and tension and grief and we carry around all this stuff and yet we really don't have to if just more people knew even to say I'm enough every day. And to say another of my favorite things is I'm choosing this and I'm choosing to feel great. I'm choosing to work on my website all week and I'm choosing to go to the gym. I don't love it but I love having a six-pack. I'm choosing to say no to Krispy Kreme donuts and yes to apples.

Love Krispy Kreme.

Do you?

I could eat 12 of them right now. Oh, so good. But I choose the empty.

Yeah, yeah.

And if you say, I'm choosing to do this and choosing to feel great about it, your mind has a very clear image. The way you feel about everything is down to two things: the pictures you make in your head and the words you say to yourself. There's nothing else. So if you choose to run going, I'm running, so I'm raising money for charity. So I'm going to complete this run even though my feet hurt, my knee hurts because I'm going to raise money. But you could run going, oh I hate this. I could be at home watching Netflix, I haven't eaten and then my knee hurts and then you'll have to stop. So when you keep saying I'm choosing it... Because, yeah. So if you're an Olympic athlete you would choose to get up at 4am and train. If you are an diabetic you choose to put a needle in your arm. If you wear lenses you choose to jab your finger in your eye but you don't go oh I hate it. I can't accept it and I can't change it. And when you say I'm choosing to study, to work, I want to go and talk to this girl I really like or to put good food in my body and I'm choosing to feel great about that too. There is no resistance. This is when you go I want donuts and I can't have them. I've got to eat this freaking rabbit food. What your mind does is it increases the desire for donuts because you said, I want donuts, but I can't have them. I want pizza.

I'm eating kale.

I can't have these, but I choose to eat pizza. I can eat pizza every day. When I'm 95, I'm gonna knock myself out with pizza. But right now, I actually want to look really good in my clothes. Maybe out of them, too. So I'll save the pizza when I'm 80. because that door is probably shut then anyway. Then you can have loads of pizza.

Every day.

But you have to reason with your mind and negotiate and your mind will always do what it thinks you want. That's its job. And if you could only tell your mind what you want using relevant up to the minute words, you'll get exactly what you want.

What do you struggle with telling your mind? Is there anything that you...

It took me a long time to tell my mind not to eat sugar. I still look at it and go.

It looks so nice.

That's me. But I still look at can be. The other day I was really tired. I went into a shop to get a coffee and they had jars of jellies. I thought, I could eat all of those. All of it. But I'm choosing not to. And I just had the coffee. So working out, you know, and we're on a schedule, sometimes just finding the time to go to the gym or do yoga, making the time. Yeah, that's probably the only. 22, really eating healthy food all the time, even on a plane, even sometimes where there is no healthy food, then you've got to wait and choosing to make myself X's when I don't want to. But other than that, nothing really, because I'm, I couldn't do what I do unless I was really good at dialogue. My mind is my best friend. It's my, the best PA I've ever had, and it does what I want because I give it clear instructions. instructions.

What do you say yourself on a daily basis? Is there like a process in the morning, afternoon, night or what would it be like?

Actually when I wake up the first thing I would say is I love my life. I love my linen, I love my cup of tea, I always wake up going I love my life. And then when I make my coffee, I love this tea, I love the coffee, I love the shower gel in my shower. Because I really believe that if you can make your mind get excited by little things, then big things every day is like Christmas. And I think when you wake up, you should go, oh, what have I got today? Oh, a world of stress. I've got this, this, this, this, this. So you should always wake up and go, I love my life. I'm alive in a free country. I've got all this stuff to make tea. And life is great. So I do that. The second thing I do is I tend I have to stay in bed and do all my emails, because then I feel like I'm not working, because I'm in bed propped up, drinking my tea, and I get all of that.

Out of the way.

Yes, that's very relaxed. Not stressed. Not stressed. I try not to have to rush to go to work, but sometimes I do. And I mean, I'm very lucky, because I love what I do, and I do what I love. People say, you work really hard. I go, I've never worked a day in my life. I don't know what that is. I don't have to go, whereas my ideal life is a weekend. People say, oh, the weekend, I go, what's a weekend? I can take time off. I mean, I love my job because I get to make such a difference. So I don't really have much to moan about. Maybe communicating with my daughter is sometimes a challenge because I'm so positive that she occasionally wants me to be super negative.

Why is that?

Well, I guess because you have to be the opposite of your parents. I do all these positive. She's an artist and she does lots of negative statements on her paintings, on her t-shirts because that's the deal. You've got to be the opposite of your parents. But I understand that. But she's great. But really, I don't have much to complain about.

You have a positive conversation with yourself pretty much 24/7. What about a nightly routine? Do you have a thought that you say to yourself?

One you see, for me, I really believe that first it's what you do and then it's who you are. So first you're doing it and then it's who you are and it's so who you are that it wouldn't occur to you to have to make yourself do it. See, I would never sit on the couch and go, my case is lost. I just know it. It's all going to go wrong. There's no cabs out there. This is a horrible flight. I now have a belief and it really, it's just me that there's no such thing as being bored if my flight is late. I mean, I just get on my laptop, on my phone. I mean, it's. I have 24 hour entertainment empty out my emails, look at something. The days of having to wait and being bored, even waiting in the car, my little phone is like, everything. Books, messages, videos. And so I love that. I don't really mind about missing stuff and being late anymore. In fact, when I was last Landing here two weeks ago, I was because I was so into this movie.

Hopefully it's delayed.

Yeah, it was delayed. When they're pilots, we've got to go around. That's so great. That's exactly how long is left of this movie. But I think it's important for people to understand that it isn't what you do. It's a bit like people who say, I've done yoga every day, and now it's just my soul. Like Meghan Markle said that yoga is in my soul. I don't do yoga. Yoga is part of my life. It's like you don't say, I walk my dog. If you've had a dog for 20 years, just get up, pick up the lead, and it's who you are, not what you do. And so for me, it really isn't what I do because it's so a part of me and I like it. And so I'm quite lucky that I'm pretty happy and positive, but I really do love my life, and that's a good thing.

Was there ever something in the last 10 years that questioned everything that you've done or that question your ability to say, I love my life.

You know, I did get very sick, like, a year ago, and I thought, wow, how could that happen? You know, I'm so happy and positive and eat well. So I was a bit surprised when I got sick. But then I did you get through that? The same thing, the thinking, the belief. I decided I'd focus on massive healing. I kept telling my body that it was a cancer fighting machine. I was making all these NK killer cells. And I did actually go home the next day. I was on stage a week later and my doctor was like, wow, you become the poster girl for just going on with your life. And now I look at one particular YouTube and think that's so bizarre. I had like major surgery just a week before that and you'd never know. But again, It's a belief I decided I do wellness. I said, the husband, I need to go home. And I went and I got into my own bed. I watched Ray Donovan. I said, this is it. I'm doing wellness here. I'm not going to lie in that bed where they keep trying to give you pills. And I didn't feel any pain at all because I just kept telling my body to heal itself. And then later I thought, maybe it's good I got that because I can help other people. And I go, look, you know, Life throws stuff at you, but you get to choose how to deal with it. And even then I noticed that I was very positive because I had actually got womb cancer. I thought, stroke of luck to get womb cancer, I don't need a womb, it's done its job. I've had a great kid, I talked to my womb and said thanks for giving me this great kid, but now I've got to get rid of you because I've got to stay here and raise this great kid. And I thought, that's good, I mean imagine if you get brain cancer or bone cancer. I felt very lucky it was a disposable organ. They'd done a great job. I didn't need it. And so I think once you become like that, it's just who you are. So I never had, oh my God, I'm gonna die. Because I thought, no, I'm not going anywhere. It is all perspective. I mean, I still, you know, people would say to me, but I thought you were so healthy. How could you get that? As it turns out, I have some, that same gene that Angelina Jolie has. But then of course Bruce Lipton would tell you, you can turn off a gene. You can mentally remove that gene. So even with adversity, because it's quite good in a way, because people think, oh your life's just, you're like Pollyanna just tripping along, having a wonderful life. That's not true. I've still had adversity. But your mind will always kick in when it's well trained and go, this is a blip. Just a blip, just carry on. And so you've got to train your mind like you train a horse. You know, I say your mind's like a Ferrari, and if you've never driven a Ferrari, it's going to go all over the place. But if you have Ferrari driving lessons, you're going to run that Ferrari. The Ferrari should not be running you.

Whether you meditate or you're under that two-minute drill in football or you're a ballerina and you have that that perfect, you know, dance routine coming up or maneuver, you are actually disengaging some of the things that would get in the way of you releasing a performance. So you're not thinking the performance, you're getting out of the way of your being.

You're just, yeah.

And that has a different measurable electrical flow state.