The 9 SCIENCE BASED Ways To Heal Your Mind & Keep It HEALTHY! | Lewis Howes

Thanks to advances in science, we actually have more tools than ever before to help us better manage the difficulties that we're facing. Make sure you get out a piece of paper and a pen because this is going to be backed with a lot of great insights to help you overcome this. This video is brought to you by BetterHelp and you're going to hear more about them later in this video. I think you got to have a dream.

The school of greatness. Really?

Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howell.

Today, nearly 20% of adults in the US alone experience some form of struggle of illness related to their mental health. That might be a result of the pressure that we feel to look or act a certain way from social media, the loneliness that we've been feeling during the pandemic, the shifting of the economy, or something else entirely. But here's the good news. Thanks to advances in science, technology and the progress we've made to begin erasing the stigma around mental health, we actually have more tools than ever before to help us better manage the difficulties that we're facing. And during this episode, I'm going to share nine science backed techniques that you can use to keep your mind healthy every day. Now, without a healthy mind, you'll only get so far in life. Chasing after your dreams and showing up for your loved ones is already challenging enough for so many of us. And doing so while struggling to get out of your own head will make it even more difficult. And that's why I hope you gained valuable insights during this special solo episode. And now make sure you get out a piece of paper and a pen because this is going to be backed with a lot of great insights to help you overcome this. So let's dive in. The number one thing is you want to seek out moments of awe on a regular basis. Now, when we're going through challenges or hardships, one of the toughest things to do is to actually step back and be objective about the situation. And something that can help us more easily become objective is experiencing moments of awe or wonder on a regular basis in our lives. Now, moments of awe can be going out in nature, doing a meditation practice, checking out awe inspiring architecture, watching a masterpiece movie, or experiencing something for the very first time. And the science supports the importance of seeking out those moments as well. There's a growing number of studies that link consistent exposure to nature with lowering levels of stress, increased focus and better overall mental health. It's extremely powerful. Now what these moments do is jumpstart what's called the shrinking of self. Now this is the feeling of amazement that happens when we look out into the ocean, or we stand on the side of a mountain, or we look up at the trees during a hike. By reminding ourselves how immense life is and how much more there is out there where we're able to better put our problems into perspective, even if it's just for a few moments in the day, we're able to block out the noise and see the beauty through all the different suffering and pain that we might experience. This is one of the best parts about traveling to new places, but even if you can't afford to travel far away from your own home, there are moments of awe everywhere around you. You just have to be curious enough to seek them out. So that's the first thing Number two is to find your ritual recipe now you probably hear a lot about morning routines or success habits and other daily rituals. There's a good reason for that though, because rituals help us organize the external world with the internal one. They give us a feeling of peace and order no matter how chaotic the outside world gets for us. And my thoughts on developing rituals are pretty simple. Bare minimum. I think we should all strive to have a routine that we do in the morning and one we do at night right before bed. These can be as elaborate or as basic as you'd like. For example, I'm a big fan of making my bed before I start the day. This might seem like a small win, but it sends my mind a signal that I'm in full control of my life and it tells my brain that I'm going to be the ruler of my day rather than letting the day rule me. And by having a morning ritual, you're letting your mind know that you're going to be proactive today instead of reactive, which so many people are in the world. I can sit here and tell you to do this or that, but the truth is that not everything works for everyone and there's not a cure all solution when it comes to finding the perfect routine for you. That's why I encourage you to consistently explore and experiment with a wide variety of different rituals to find out what works for you. Keep a journal and write down your state of mind after trying each of them of them. And how did the routine make you feel compared to the ones you tried a previous week or month? Explore. Try new things. Now the important thing here isn't necessarily how it gets done, it's whether or not it gets done at all. And once you've found the recipe of rituals that puts you in the best possible state you'll be one step closer to a healthier mind. And that's the key. Number three, this is a big one. Monitor your self, talk closely. This is a huge one. The way we speak to ourselves is one of the most important ways we can keep our minds healthy. And it makes sense why that's the case. In our everyday lives, we expect good things to happen to us. We expect to get respect. We expect for other people to love us. But ask yourself this, why do we expect something from others that we can't even give to ourselves? So many people aren't giving that to themselves, but they want it from other people. If you're always putting yourself down internally, then how do you expect to develop the level of self love that's necessary to reach your full potential? If you're always saying you aren't good enough or you aren't smart enough, something I did as a kid a lot growing up, then how would that negative self talk not start to become a part of your main identity? And if your identity is rooted in a negative place and you don't invest time in healing or shifting that, then you might even begin to self sabotage whenever life is going well and everything is clicking. Does this sound familiar to anyone? On top of that, studies have shown that having negative thoughts consistently over long periods of time leads to an increased chance of disease, poor focus and poor relationships. So ask yourself, am I thinking and saying negative things to myself consistently? If so, how are things showing up in my life? Do I have quality relationships and friendships? Do I get good opportunities? Do I feel healthy? Your thoughts are linked to these things around you, so make sure you're paying close attention and start shifting these things. So how do we turn things around when it comes to overcoming negative self talk? When I had him on the show, award winning psychologist Dr. Ethan Cross gave us a couple simple yet effective ways to make this happen. The first is called mental time travel or temporal distancing. And I love this strategy to do it. Next time you have a negative thought, ask yourself how many times has this happened before? Ask yourself what specific evidence you have that supports that thought. For example, let's say you have a work project that's due soon and you're beginning to get nervous about it. You're worried about what your co workers and your boss will start to doubt your abilities and your whole reputation will fall apart if you don't deliver what's expected. Now in that moment, take a step back and ask yourself what evidence you have that proves or disproves something about this thought and have you ever turned in a project that your boss hated it and immediately began to doubt your abilities? Have you ever turned in a project where you were fired on the spot? Probably not because your company hired you for a reason and your abilities are what got you employed there in the first place. Now the other tactic Dr. Cross mentioned is called distant self talk. This is really cool. Next time you find yourself engaging in negative self talk or in a stressful situation, begin to talk to yourself in the third person. Now this may sound a little weird, but I think it's cool you say this. Louis, let's relax and figure this out. Louis, you've been here before and it always went well. You're going to be okay. The reason for this is pretty simple. We're naturally better at giving other people advice and giving them grace than we are at giving it to ourselves. So by calling ourselves by our name, we'll be able to more closely mirror that pattern of behavior. So try it for yourself. And to wrap this section up, I want you to remember this. Dr. Ethan Cross also told me that a thought doesn't become destructive until it becomes chronic. So keep in mind that we all experience moments of self doubt. It's unavoidable and out of our control for most of the part. But what we can control though, is how we engage with that thought and for how long we engage with it. So be sure to monitor, be sure to manage and minimize negative self talk when you can. It's really cool strategies and I hope you enjoyed that one. The fourth thing that you really want to learn how to master is to create a mission for your life. Now something I've learned time and time again is that having a mission or a vision for your life is one of the best things you can do for your mental wellness. I did this in sports. I would have goals and a vision for each season and it really helped me have focus during that season of life. Now having a purpose bigger than yourself can make the down times in life a lot easier. Now as human beings, we're wired to ask these questions, why? What is our meaning here on earth? So why not create one and help put your mind at ease while you're on this human being journey? This isn't some woo woo idea either. Multiple studies have shown that people with a strong sense of purpose and meaning in their life tend to experience better mental health, overall well being and cognitive performance compared to those that don't have a meaningful purpose. Now having a meaning in life has been linked to also lowering chances of dementia, heart attacks and strokes. So there's many health benefits to this as well. And my personal mission is to impact 100 million lives on a weekly basis through inspiring content, action driven programs and life changing events. And to get started on your own mission. Remember to be as specific as possible and focus on the why behind what you do. Why do you want this mission? Why is it meaningful to you? For instance, let's say you're a documentary filmmaker and you want to start by asking yourself, what is the meaning behind your documentaries? What aspect of the job lights you up the most? Is it making people who watch your movies rethink their beliefs? Is it inspiring people to change their lives for the better? Really think about it and dig deep here. Then once you have that question answered, get even more specific. A good example of a vision for this person could be My mission is to challenge people to question the status quo through the creation of one documentary film every two years. There you go. It's specific, it's actionable, and it gives purpose to all the hard work that goes into making these documentaries. Of course, there are countless other ways to lead a life of service as well. And you can get involved in volunteering, local charities, your church, if you're a religious person, and the list goes on and on. The most important thing to remember and get clear on is finding a purpose that gets you excited, that you want to jump out of bed in the morning, not just roll out of bed and drag yourself out. Number five, get involved in therapy. I've always been a huge proponent of having coaches in the areas of my life that I find important. For example, my physical health is very important for me. So I hire trainers and instructors who walk me through workouts and help me track my performance over time for my business. It's important for me. I check in with my circle of influence on a regular basis and I continually lean on them and get coaching from them. And in recent years, I've really applied the same principle to my mental health by getting involved in therapy and mastering emotional regulation. And it's been an absolute game changer. Every couple of weeks I talk with my therapist. It's been so valuable to have someone who's professionally trained, who's able to give me coaching and feedback and guidance to keep my mental health in order. And I also, like this person, doesn't really have a close tie or vested interest in me. So I can count on them to give me advice that's objective, not subjective or biased. And over the past couple years, getting access to therapy has become even more important as struggles with mental health continue to increase in the world. In fact, the American Psychological association reported that 8 out of 10 psychologists in the US have reported an increase in demand for anxiety treatment since the start of the pandemic. That's crazy. There's so much stress and anxiety in the world. And while we still have a lot of work to do to completely erase the stigma around mental health, the good news is things appear to be trending in a good direction. And in the past, one of the hurdles standing the way of people getting therapy was the cost, how expensive it was, and unless you were in a good place financially, consistently investing in therapy was a bill that so many people just simply couldn't afford. But today's sponsor, BetterHelp, is one of the leading forces in helping make professional therapy more affordable and accessible to everyone. And I recently jumped on a call with certified BetterHelp therapist Melissa to dive deeper into why we should erase the stigma around supporting therapy. The role therapy has played in my life, personally, the impact has had for me, and why it should still be a necessity in your life as well. And I want you to check it out to hear what this discussion was all about. It's really powerful. How important is it for everyone to be thinking about exploring therapy and using therapy even if they feel like everything is okay? Do you think it's important for everyone to be exploring it more?

Over 50% of people who are struggling with a mental health challenge never actually receive any treatment for it. And one reason I really Love working for BetterHelp is knowing and seeing just how many people are coming here for the very first time, because we're making it easier for people to get that help that they need. So if it's your first time considering therapy, you're in good hands and in good company. And depending on what you're struggling with, not getting help can lead to worsening symptoms. So for instance, untreated anxiety could lead to panic attacks, or untreated depression can make it really difficult to do what we call activities of daily living. Getting dressed, getting out of bed, taking care of your hygiene, taking care of household chores. These things are a big deal and can become really challenging when someone's experiencing depression. Mental health, self care, therapy, they're all important because no matter what, we're going to continue facing stressors and challenges. And therapy can help us learn more about ourselves and our patterns and our strengths. So it's really something we can all benefit from.

I'm curious for people that maybe think it's a weakness or think that you should only go to therapy when there's something wrong with you or that you have a problem. How do people overcome that stigma? Specifically for me, growing up as an athlete in the Midwest, it was never looked at as something that was okay or healthy to go to therapy. How do people overcome that, that potential idea of looking weak by working with a therapist.

Therapy is not necessarily about fixing something that is broken. Instead, I like to think of it as an opportunity to learn about our strengths, an opportunity to challenge ourselves, to grow a way to learn and embrace and be grateful for what we have, all with the goal of reaching our full potential and feeling our best. So I think it's really about reframing what therapy is, who goes to therapy, what it's for, and tending to our mental health and taking care of ourselves should really be a daily practice and not something we only focus on when things are really rough or when we've reached some sort of breaking point.

Some people don't find the best coaches right away, or maybe they try therapy and they're like, I didn't have the best experience, or that person didn't really resonate with me. How can people use betterhelp and make sure they find someone who really makes them feel comfortable and works for them with their current life situation?

In therapy and psychology, there's an abundance of research that suggests the very most important factor in good therapy outcomes, in helping people feel better through therapy, is what we call the therapeutic alliance or the working alliance. And a big component of that is just the bond or the vibe that it is felt and created between the client and the therapist.

So because it's very intimate, it's very vulnerable to open up and share these things that you probably haven't shared with your friends, friends or your family members. It's very. You might feel judged or shameful about certain things that you're thinking or feeling. So it's really important to find the right person that you can trust and feel comfortable with, right?

Absolutely. You want to feel like they. They get you, you can be yourself, that they understand you, that you're working towards goals together and that they're in your corner. And a big part of developing that solid, trusting relationship is taking your preferences into account. So for some people, it's really important that they're talking to a woman therapist. For some, it's critical that they speak with a man. We have many people that want a therapist of color, so all of these preferences are really important to us. And finding you the best match is really important to us because we know how critical it is when it comes to effective and quality care.

I'm curious if someone is watching or listening to this right now and they feel and they have insurance or maybe they don't have insurance. How can they get started? What's the process for getting started and trying it out?

Yeah, so the process is pretty easy. We have a short questionnaire that you fill out and we ask you some of those prep that you might have and we take what you input and we have this matching algorithm and at the very end we spit that algorithm to our network of therapists and a match usually happens within 20 to 24 to 48 hours.

I love this, Melissa. I'm so excited about this. Again. I've been a big fan and proponent of therapy for myself. I do it every two weeks for the last year and a half and it has helped me in my business grow. It's helped me in my personal relationships grow. It's helped me in my managing my team better and just managing conflict in general in my life and having more peace on a daily basis. So I cannot Recommend Therapy and BetterHelp enough. But if people want to get signed up today and try it out, where can they go? How can they get signed up?

Yeah, you can visit betterhelp.com greatness to get started today and all your listeners will receive 10% off their first month of therapy.

Melissa, thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

If you want more, make sure to go to betterhelp.com greatness for the three big reasons why online therapy has been so helpful for me, this is number six. Conduct a digital detox for all the amazing things the Internet has given us. Like anything else, there are always ways it can become harmful if we aren't careful with how we use it. There are even a handful of recent studies that have linked social media overload with mental health issues. And one of them is conducted by the University of Pennsylvania. And it found that there was a connection between using social media apps like Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat and a lower sense of overall well being. Now, the study also found that decreasing the usage of these apps led to a lower likelihood for symptoms of depression and loneliness. That's crazy. Just using them less will decrease those things. Now there are different theories explaining why this is the case, but most of the research suggests that it has something to do with the consistent comparisons of feeling fomo. Now, there are different theories explaining why this is the case, but most of the research suggests that it has something to do with the consistent constant comparisons and feelings of FOMO that we get when we are associated with excessive social media use. Now, I'm not saying you need to go and delete all your social media accounts or toss your smartphone out of the window. Like I said, there are a lot of incredible benefits and opportunities that the Internet has given to us. But what I am saying is that if you're struggling with mental chatter or constantly feeling stressed, then keeping a close pulse on your social media usage and is one way that can help you overcome those emotions. It's so key. And one great way to get to that point without giving up social media altogether is called a digital detox. This is where you limit or you eliminate your connection to electronic devices for a set amount of time. Now, a big advocate of digital detoxes who's been on the show before is best selling author and professor Cal Newport. Now, Cal explained to me that taking part in digital detoxes is an effective way to improve our cognitive fitness, which he defines as the ability to be okay with being bored. This is huge. No one is bored anymore. He went on to say that today we've largely lost the ability because our brains are now programmed to get a reward every time we're bored. Now every time we have nothing to do, we open up our smartphone and we watch a funny TikTok video or YouTube clip or something else that gives our brains that instant reward. And there are a number of different ways to do a digital detox. One is defining exactly what you're going to eliminate and for how long the period is. This could be a specific social media app or website you feel isn't serving your mental health the highest level. And if you want to take a bit slower, you can also do what's called a digital fast, where you set boundaries with your phone or your laptop. Maybe you promise yourself that you'll only use your phone between noon and 8pm for one week out of the month and try that out. By becoming more intentional with our smartphones and social media usage, we'll be more in control of the actions we take because of them, instead of them being in trouble of us. And to wrap up on that point, I spent a week where I went on a flight to Hawaii by myself a few years ago and I left my laptop and my phone at home. I had no electronics. I was there for a week and the first day it felt like I was getting off of a sugar addiction or something. It was really hard to not try to find something that I wanted to go and check. But then after a day and a half, my nervous system calmed down. I was relaxed. I was so present. I was able to go back to one of those first points of being in awe. I just looked at a tree and I was in awe. I looked at the ocean, the mountains. I was in nature and I was just in awe. And it made me feel so much more peace. It made me feel so much more connected to the earth, connected to myself, as opposed to disconnected on my phone consistently. This is a powerful thing you can try. Try it for a day, try it for an hour, see how it feels. It could change your life. Number seven is to get involved in a community that shares your similar values. Now this might seem pretty obvious, but human beings are wired to connect. And whether you're an introvert, extrovert, or something in between, we're all meant to experience life with other people who care about our well being. In fact, one study has found that neighborhoods with higher levels of social connection experience lower rates of mental health issues when compared to those with lower levels of social connection. And this was independent of how wealthy or non wealthy that neighborhood was. It was all about the connection. And as people, we need to feel a part of something larger than ourselves. We need to feel loved and supported. And with all that's happened over the past couple years, I know how easy it can be to feel isolated, to feel alone, and to feel left behind. It's not a fun feeling. And if you're already involved and active in a welcoming community of people who share your values, then that's incredible. Keep those relationships alive by planning events, monthly meetups, grabbing dinner with people, or any other way you can connect. Just jump on the phone, call and say hi to a friend. And if you don't already have a community, there are a lot of tools available today that can help you find one online resources like meetup.com, there's Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, Eventbrite that let you browse local events and connect with others who share your similar values and interests. And similar to what I already mentioned when talking about finding your purpose, you can also get involved in local charities and other organizations. And I also want to share with you this when it comes to finding your community, if you resonate with the message and the mission that we are on here at the School of Greatness, then I encourage you to consider attending the Summit of Greatness. It's a live three day experience that happens every fall in Columbus, Ohio and it brings together all the members of this greatness community. It's an incredible experience. It's a truly transformational weekend and every single year people message me saying how they found lifelong bonds and connections at the event. People who have gotten engaged and are getting married, who met at the summit of greatness. They it's incredible. If it sounds like something you'd be interested in, make sure to go to summitofgreatness.com get yourself a ticket or two before they sell out and learn more information about this event. Again, go to summitofgreatness.com to sign up and I hope to see you in Columbus, Ohio this fall. Number eight, Keep tabs on your nutrition I can't emphasize this point enough. We all know how important healthy food and nutrition is for our overall function of our bodies. But recent studies are showing that the connection between nutrition and our brains is stronger than we might have ever thought as well. Now this is mostly a result of what's called the brain gut connection. The brain gut connection is possible because we know that nutrition rich foods helps produce good bacteria which promotes the production of neurotransmitters in our brains. Now with better production of neurotransmitters comes clearer signals to our brains which has a big impact in controlling our overall mood. This is massive. And when we eat junk food, this whole process is negatively effective which leads to inflammation and other side effects. Now in short, what we eat has a massive impact on how we feel and over time could also be the factor when it comes to our mental health. So what foods should we be avoiding and which foods should we be eating on a regular basis? Well, I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Emerin Meyer, one of the pioneers who helped discover the brain gut connection. And he said we should focus on eating whole, natural plant based foods like vegetables whenever we can, in addition to healthy fats like nuts and and seeds. But also avoiding foods that are high in fat and high in sugar will keep our brain gut connection healthy, which can help regulate our minds and keep tabs on our mental health. Nutrition is the key guys. Make sure you focus on this and keep track of it. And last but not least, number nine is a big one. It's all about mastering your breathing. One of the most powerful tools for keeping our minds in a calm state is something we too often take for granted, our breath. If you're able to control your breath and connect with it during times of stress or anxiety, you'll be tapping into a super effective strategy for emotional regulation. There are thousand different breathing techniques out there, so I Encourage you to explore them and see what works for you. But today, I'm going to dive into three specific breathing practices that we can all use when we're feeling anxiety starting to kick in. And I learned the first one from Stanford professor Dr. Andrew Huberman. And when he was on the show, he demonstrated what he called the physiological sigh. This technique helps bring down the levels of carbon dioxide in our blood. It is actually the same type of breathing that we engage in when we sleep. The pattern is a double inhale through the nose, usually a long breath, followed by a quick shorter one, and then a prolonged exhale through our mouth. Now, it might seem easy, but the science has shown that it really works. In fact, Andrew's lab found that our carbon dioxide levels can be significantly brought down in as little as 1, 2, or 3 physiological sighs. This is because the long exhale sends a signal to the heart to slow down, which helps lower anxiety and leads us into a calmer state. So here's an example. Two inhales in and then a sigh. Do that a few times and see how it feels. Another method comes from one of my friends, the Dutch daredevil, motivational speaker and crazy iceman Wim Hof. He actually demonstrated his famous breathing technique to me in person a few years back on the channel. And you can watch that full session if you want to, but this technique usually takes a few minutes or more to do. So I won't demonstrate the entire thing for you in this episode, but I encourage you to write it down what I'm about to tell you and give it a try. First, you want to get into a comfortable position, either lying down or sitting down, and be comfortable. You want to clear your mind. Then breathe in fully and exhale deeply. So you're going to breathe in and you're going to repeat this 30 to 40 times. Now, on the last breath of that set, you blow the air all the way out, and then you hold your breath. You hold your breath until you need to take a breath in. You inhale through your nose until you feel your chest fully expanded. Then you hold for 15 seconds, and then you start again. You exhale, and then you start again. Remember, I'm already just getting sweaty just doing it a few times. I can feel it in my body really start to activate. And I remember when I did this for the first time, feeling so at peace and relaxed after I did it. You can do this a few times through and it'll really start to feel it throughout your entire body. But you want to make sure you're relaxed and in a neutral position. And the third and final technique is what's called box breathing. It's called this because you do the exercise in counts of four. To get started, get an upright position or a seated position. Empty out your lungs and then slowly inhale for four seconds. So exhale your lungs and then you inhale for four seconds. You hold your breath for another four seconds and you blow out for four seconds and you repeat the process again and again. So it's four in, four hold, four out, repeat the process. And similar to what the psychological side does, box breathing helps clear out the built up carbon dioxide in our bodies and then it puts us in a more relaxed state. So I encourage you to try these breathing strategies if you haven't already. It really will help you calm your mind, calm your body, get into a place of peace so you can think more clearly and let go of the stress that you might have in your life. There you have it guys. The nine science backed ways to keep your mind healthy we're all at different stages of our journey, both in life and with our mental health and in this episode I wanted to dive into a wide variety of proven science based practices so you can see which ones work best for your specific current situation. I encourage you to try them all and be sure to let me know how it goes over on social media or if you're on YouTube watching. Make sure to leave a comment below on your favorite technique out of the nine practices. Also, if you want another episode on these science backed practices to improve your mental health, go ahead and leave a comment below letting me know if you want another Episode A Part 2 on this as well and we'll dive into more of the research and the science of what's really been working to optimize your mind. So let me know. Just type a yes in the comments below if you want another one. And I want to leave you with one final question and a challenge for you to take away today. Ask yourself this Are you your biggest supporter in life or are you the person who hurts yourself the most? Too often we talk to ourselves in a way we never speak to. A loved one going through a hard time or a friend who's in need of our support. Too often we constantly tear ourselves down internally and then we wonder why we don't have the self love or the confidence to get out of the rut that we're in. In order for us to level up and achieve our dreams, we need to turn into our biggest supporter and our number one fan and I know this can be challenging when you feel overwhelmed and stressed and nothing's going in your favor. But beating yourself up will not help you. It will only hurt you. You've got to shift the conversation that you have with yourself in your own mind. And now for the challenge. I want you to make a declaration to give yourself more grace this month and for the rest of the year. I want you to make a decision to love yourself inside and out. And when no one's watching, make sure to do that as well, especially when no one's watching. Love yourself. Be kind to yourself inside and out, no matter where you're at. You can make magic out of any situation that life throws you. Any mess that life throws you, you can make magic out of it. I want to remind you that if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. Thank you so much for being here and I'll see you in the next episode. If you got value from that, then go ahead and stick around for more. Coming up right now.

Now.

So how do we learn to have patience when we are hyper alert or overwhelmed? Exhausted Stress.

Okay. So when we are hyper alert, there's a mechanism associated with that that makes our internal world measure time differently. What happens under those conditions is you feel like the external world is moving very slowly. I think I might have mentioned this in our previous meeting, but when you're really stressed on the hyper alert side, it seems like the world is going very slowly. You're gonna just knowing that and knowing that, it's likely that you're gonna feel impatient. And if the world is moving much too slow. So if you're trying to get someplace on time and the person in front of you doesn't know where you're going, I was the guy not knowing where I was going this morning. And we can't see each other in cars. You think, what is this person doing? Oh my goodness. And they're just looking for the right turn. So there's that. And then when we are fatigued, it seems like the world is going wrong really fast. Okay. And so for people who are exhausted, everything feels overwhelming. Now, of course, the rate that things are actually moving in the world is the same, but the perception is that it's just too much and we can't cope. So we talked about a tool to calm oneself. The reason I like the physiological sigh is we are all equipped with the pathway. If people want to know if there are some medically oriented folks out there or if you want to teach this to Other folks, there's a nerve called the phrenic nerve, nerve P, H R E N I C that goes from the brain down to the diaphragm, that controls that and then controls the lungs. And so when you decide, okay, I'm going to use the psi, the physiological side, to calm myself in a way, you're engaging top down control because you're taking control of your internal landscape rather than trying to take control of your thinking, which is very hard.

You can't fix your mind with your mind.

Sometimes trying to control the mind with the mind is like trying to grab fog. It's just going to keep moving, right? If you've ever tried to grab or smoke, it just moves, it's vapors. You're never going to grab it. The key is to take control of the system by taking control of a real physical entity. This phrenic nerve. And the reason I describe this stuff is not to put a lot of unnecessary detail, but I think when people realize this isn't something that you build up over time and then are able to do that, you literally have a wire, set of wires that goes down to your diaphragm, this muscle in your abdomen that can move your lungs. And then as you blow off carbon dioxide, when you do that exhale, your brain starts to calm down and then your mind, the top down control of the cortex, can start taking control of the limbic system again. It's almost like you're losing control of the automobile and you're trying to steer, but really there's another lever that if you just pull it, then the state, the steering wheel will stabilize for you. So that's the way to think about the physiological sigh. On the other side of things, when you're feeling overwhelmed and fatigued, there are two ways to approach that. First is the kind of foundation of fatigue, which is almost always poor sleep and scheduling of sleep. This is something that doesn't get discussed a lot. I don't think I've discussed this on any podcast previously. But getting better at sleeping, a whole set of practices. But sleep is a slow tool. It's not a real time tool. Because if you're feeling exhausted and you have to get up and have your day, deal with children, deal with work, deal with life. We can talk about how to get better at sleeping, but in real time. What you want to do is you want to bring more alertness into the system. Focus, focus and alertness. The way to do that is to take advantage of a very well established medical fact. All medical students learn this all MBs know this, which is that there's a direct relationship between how you breathe and your heart rate. And so I'll give a little bit of the background, and then I'll give the specific practice just so that people understand where this is coming from. So when we inhale. When we inhale, it almost feels like everything's moving up. But actually what happens is our diaphragm moves down. Okay. So when we inhale, our diaphragm moves down. When that happens, our heart literally gets a little bit bigger. The volume of the heart gets a little bit bigger, which means that whatever blood in there is moving per unit time, a little bit slower. And there's a set of neurons in the heart called the sinoatrial node that sends a signal to the brain and says, hey, blood flow is slowing down. And the brain sends a signal back to the heart and says, okay, let's speed up. And speeds up the heart rate. So the short, concise way to put it is when you inhale more vigorously or longer, you're speeding up your heart rate. There's a name for it in the medical community, but the important thing to understand is as you inhale, you're sending a neural signal to your heart to speed up. And when you exhale, the diaphragm moves up, the heart gets a little bit smaller, literally, because there's less space there. Then there's a signal sent to the brain, and the brain sends a signal back and says, slow down the heart rate.

So this is happening quickly. So if you inhale, it's speeding up.

That's right.

If you exhale, it's slowing it down.

That's right. So if you want to become more alert, you actually can just simply make your inhales a little bit more vigorous or a little bit longer than your exhale. So let's say you get up in.

The morning, our longer inhale, slowly, shorter exhale.

That's right. Not to speed up your heart rate and to be more alert, not longer.

Exhale, double intake, Right? Shorter, yeah.

So longer or more vigorous inhales will speed up your heart rate and make you more alert. Longer or more vigorous or more vigorous exhales will slow down your heart rate and make you less alert.

Wow.

And there's.

This has a name which is, you know, it's a certain kind of arrhythmia, but that makes it sound bad. This is actually what's happening all the time. This is the basis of heart rate variability. When people talk about heart rate variability is good, you know, that you don't want your heart rate to be one level all day, high or low. A lot of people don't realize that. They think, oh, I got a nice slow heart rate.

You think, all day long we were asleep. That's right.

Well, slow heart rate is better than high heart. Artificially hot, you know, sorry, excessively high heart rate. But you don't want your heart rate to be like this. You want your heart rate to go through these fluctuations. Heart rate variability is good.

Why?

Because heart rate variability reflects the activation of what's typically called the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the brain's ability to slow down and calm the nervous system. So when your heart rate is going like this, it means that your heart rate is speeding up and then your brain is slowing it down, your heart rate speeding it up, and your brain is slowing down. And that's what's happening all day long as you're moving through things in a kind of calm, alert way. But when you get that troubling text message or you see a post or a comment and you go. And all of a sudden your heart rate just goes. And you feel like you immediately want to respond, or you're going to say the thing that maybe you shouldn't say, you're going to do the thing that maybe you shouldn't do, or you just want to be more thoughtful and more targeted in your response. The key is to slow down the heart rate by making your exhales longer or more vigorous. So it could simply be. And then shorter inhales, longer exhales, or do the physiological sigh. Or if you wake up in the morning and you're experiencing the other kind of stress, which is you look at.

Your vlog in the news.

The world is overwhelming me. My life is overwhelming. I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't even know what sequence I'm going to do things in. You're just discombobulated. And a lot of people start struggle with this. The key is to do a few breaths, even while you're getting out of bed and preparing your morning coffee or water or whatever it is, and just start breathing in a way that's inhale emphasized. Which sounds weird, but basically what you're doing is you're speeding up your heart rate at some point, usually within only two or three of those breaths, you're.

Going to feel more alert.

And then you can just go back to breathing normally so you don't have.

To do this for hours. You do this for a Few moments or minutes.

That's right. And while I'm a fan of breathwork as its own thing, because breath work can teach you how to operate these levers in your brain and body, so to speak, breath work is a dedicated practice that you do away from these stressful events. Whereas learning to control your heart rate and thereby your mind, using your breathing, so it goes back, breathing, heart rate, mind in that sequence. So if your mind isn't where you want it to be, don't start with the mind, start with your breathing, which will control your heart rate, which will then allow you to control your mind.

So don't think your way out of a moment of stress. Breathe your way out of this moment of stress.

That's right. And one of the things, and I'm certain there are going to be people out there listening to this saying, wait a second, the yogis and the yogic community has been talking about this for centuries. What are you doing? This is just a recasting of what we already know. I agree, I agree. Within the science community, these things have been given crazy names like arrhythmias and heart rate variability and the diaphragm and the phrenic nerve. And so the language of science has known all about this for many centuries also, but it's been shrouded by language, and the yogic community has known about this for a long time, but it's been shrouded by language. So by bringing this discussion forth, I just want to be clear that I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel or pretend that I invented the wheel by any stretch. I'm trying to say that we all have these circuits, these levers in our body that we can pull and push, and people learn how to do this intuitively, but we're never really taught the underlying mechanisms. And I do believe that yoga's not big on mechanisms. They're very good on naming. And on yogis in different areas of the world, when they say something, they usually know what the other one is talking about. Scientists do as well. But mechanism, if people can just understand a little bit about why the heart slows down when you exhale more than you inhale, or why the heart speeds up when you inhale more than you exhale. I do believe that having that knowledge in the mind allows people, in a moment of stress, to say, oh, I understand what's happening to me, and therefore I should go to this particular tool.

Now, this has been talked about as woo woo world, positive thinking, negative thinking, but now you're bringing in Some amazing research talking about the voice in our head and why it matters. Can we talk about is it really possible to control the conscious mind? Is that even possible? Or are thoughts always going to be coming in and out without our ability to control them?

Yeah, well, it's a great question. To kick us off, here's how I break it down. We can't always control. Well, we can't control the thoughts that pop up in our head. So we don't know why I'm going to be walking down the street and all of a sudden just have a really dark thought about this or a positive thought about something. El have control over the thoughts that pop. But what we do have control over is how we engage with those thoughts once they surface. And we have a lot of control there. We can choose to immerse ourselves in the thoughts and if we immerse ourselves in the positive thoughts, that can be great. Like when I'm out here in la, I'm away from my kids and my family. I'm walking down the street, I'm thinking about my youngest daughter who tried to FaceTime me this morning at 4:30 in the morning. And it brought happiness to me just thinking about how cute that was. And it was inappropriate, but cute at the same time. I immersed in it. I can also choose to distance myself from my thoughts or challenge my thoughts. So there's a range of things we can do when thoughts pop up and that's where the control comes in. As we were mentioning a little bit earlier, we don't get taught in a systematic way how to manage our thoughts in this way. And I think that's a problem. That's one of the reasons why I wrote the book.

If someone is asking themselves what I think I am, are we our thoughts or are thoughts something that don't define us?

Well, I think this is another important Aha. That we can, we can, we can give. Because thoughts are mental events, they're things that pop up in our head. Whether they define us or not depends on whether we allow them to define us.

And what does that look like when we allow it to.

We can be strategic about that. So allowing myself to think of myself as someone who. I'm going to give you all the positive features here, right. So someone who has. Is.

Is.

Is intellectually curious, is a good friend, has humility. I allow those thoughts to define myself. I think that they are fairly accurate portrayals of who I am. Those thoughts are constantly being tested in my life. Right. Because I'm getting feedback when I interact with People when I go on different kinds of events and people, you know, say things like that informs whether that, that understanding of who I am is in touch with reality. I think we want to have that. But other kinds of thoughts, like self defeating ones, I'm not good enough. You know, this manuscript was rejected or I really put my foot in my mouth. I mean I put my foot in.

My mouth all the time.

Like it's, it hopefully won't happen during this conversation. But you know, if I allowed myself to be defined by my, by my foot in the mouth faux pas, I would not be a happy individual. So there's agency there. There is a choice to attach to some cognition some thoughts and not others.

So is it about attaching an identity to the thought? Is it saying this is who I am and where does identity play into that? Then is that allowing, okay, I am this as opposed to this is something I think, but it's not who I am?

Yeah. So it's about you can internalize or externalize. Different kinds of experiences happen to us, right? And so people who tend to be more optimistic, as an example, they'll internalize the positive, but externalize the negative. And what I mean by that is they'll take responsibility for positive things that are going on, but they'll shirk the responsibility for the negative. Well, it's about the situation. Now. You could do that to an extreme, right? So let's say you're at work and things aren't going well. You do need to experience some negativity. It's not always someone else's fault. Like sometimes it is going to be your fault. And owning that can be quite useful. One thing that I often tell people is that negative emotions aren't something that we should be trying to avoid. We evolved the capacity to experience negative emotions for a reason. They provide us with really useful information that we use to manage ourselves. And one of the best examples of this is there are children who are born into the world each year with the inability to experience physical pain. So it's a genetic anomaly. They can't anomaly.

I punch you in the face, you.

Don'T feel it, you don't feel physical pain.

I stab you with a knife, you don't feel the pain. Really.

It's a genetic polymorphism. It's in the break a bone, you don't feel the pain, you do not feel the pain. Right. So it's a mutation, it's a quirk of genetics and you can't feel the pain. What happens to these children is they die.

Young because they're not. They're putting hand on the fire, they're hitting their head over and over again.

You got it. So pain is useful in small doses. It's really helpful that if I put my hand on the flame, I pull it away. The pain, the negativity is what makes that such an amazingly adaptive response. So, so let's go away from extreme examples. If I've got a big performance coming up, a big event, thousands of people, and a couple of weeks before the whispers, Steven Spielberg talks about these as whispers in his ear. Oh my God, thousands of people. You've got to get a little bit of anxiety bubbles up. Really useful because you know what happens then I start working on the presentation. Make sure you're prepared and I practice and I so negativity, negative emotions in small doses, elegantly adaptive. When the negative emotions become harmful is when they become more chronic. And that's what chatter is all about. When we experience a negative emotion and then we get stuck in it, we get so immersed that we start looping over and over and over again. That's not good. And that's the pain point that I think so many people suffer from. And where I think the science can be really helpful because we know there are things that people can do when that happens, to manage it.

You're one of the leading experts in controlling the conscious mind. Where's the biggest challenge you face in your personal mindset? Even though you practice these tools, teach these tools, what's the chatter that still holds you back?

Well, thank you for asking this. I don't experience chatter. No, I'm lying. Of course I experience chatter. I'm a human. Actually, we've done research and what we know is that people in general are much better at advising others than they are following their own advice. We actually there's a name for this phenomenon. It's called Solomon's Paradox. It's named after the Bible's King Solomon, who was famous for being wise. But if you read his story, he was not wise when it came to his own life. He had concubines and they all got in fights and his whole kingdom unraveled. This is a truism that I can tell lots and lots of other people how to manage their chatter. And here's what the science says. But that doesn't mean I never struggle with it myself. I like to think I'm pretty good at it, but I still experience blips of chatter. The domains that I experience it mostly about the well being of my kids and my Family, I can. When something happens to them, the world stops and it's easy to start going down that rabbit hole.

Anxiety, stress, worry, fear.

Yeah. Are they gonna, you know, are they gonna be sick or are they gonna, you know, do well in school and blah, blah, blah. And the moment I catch myself experiencing that chatter, I, I try to put an end to it by using the tools that are in the book and other, you know, other tools that are out there. So, but certainly, I mean, I can experience it. Work related chatter, you know, big, big thing coming up. A big paper that gets rejected from a journal. That's the currency. And in science, like you do these experiments for years and years and years, you spend time writing them up and then you submit them and then people say, no, not so good. Yeah, that's not fun. I mean, rejection isn't a great feeling.

How does someone deal with rejection from the chatter of rejection or the fear of rejection even before they put something out there? Say they want to launch a book, a speech or whatever it is, a paper, but they're so afraid to even put it out there because of the rejection that might come versus you put it out there and it's rejected.

Yeah.

How do you manage both of those situations of chatter?

Well, so one idea that I really do believe very strongly in is that there are no single tools that work for all people across all situations. We often hear like, do this and it's going to rid you of anxiety. I've been doing research on this for 20 years. I have yet to find it. I'd be curious if you have in all the interviews and research that you've done, you know, magic pills. I've yet to find them. But what I have found are lots and lots of tools that can often be used in combinations to help people. And I think both of those situations lend themselves well to using different chatter tools. So take the concern about being rejected. If that were me and it was holding me back from doing something, one thing I would do is I would I do something called mental time travel, or in technical terms we call it temporal distancing. I think to myself about, you know, how many other situations have been like this and have I been, have I actually been rejected in the past? Yeah, like what are the rates? Like, let's do some reality testing. And when I do that, well, you know, not too many. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago I had a big presentation and it was like the prep for this presentation, it was virtual. It was designed to stress me out because first the producers said all right, we want you to script this and just record it. And I never, I never memorize talks. I just like to speak. But I did it and then I sent it to them. And, well, the lighting isn't good, so do it again. And then, and then at the, you know, the 12th hour, just do it live. So, you know, they're pushing all my buttons and I felt a little bit of chatter beginning to brew. And then I just, I remind us, Ethan, you've given yourself, you've given literally hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of presentations. They've never tanked in, you know, in a terrible way. And that realization. So looking at that broader perspective, the bigger picture, really useful. The other thing I would do is, I don't know if you were listening carefully, but when I just simulated, when I just went over what I did before, I used my own name to kind of coach myself through the experience.

Third person, third person, distant.

We call it distant self talk. And, and that's another tool that I think is personally really useful. I talk about this too. There's a lot of data behind this. We know that we're better at advising other people than we are ourselves. Right. Like, it's not, I don't think, a controversial saying, but you push back if you think it is. Of course, it's like, you know, we.

Stay in relationships far too longer when we know we should get out of them, but we tell someone else, you need to get out of that thing. It doesn't look good. We'll do certain things to hurt ourselves over and over. We'll eat the food we're not supposed to eat. We'll do all these things, but we can tell someone else, oh, you need to stop doing that.

Exactly. So here's what I find mind blowingly fascinating. We have learned. So this is a big, big, big amp up. I better deliver here. We've learned that there are ways that we could engage with ourselves like we were engaging with someone else. And language is one tool we can use to do it. And it involves coaching ourselves through a problem using our name and other, like, second person pronouns. Words like you, if you think about when we. When do we use names and second person pronoun you when we think about and refer to others. Most of the time I use names. It's when I'm addressing other people or thinking about other people. So like Lara, what is she doing right now? With my wife, you know, Danny, I'm using names. Names in our brains, like, this is the currency of thinking about others. So what happens when you use your own name to think about a problem. It's like a psychological jujitsu move. It's automatically switching your perspective and allowing you to start engaging with yourself, advising yourself like someone else.

What happens when we don't do that? When we are just. I mean, I. I'm horrible, I'm stupid. I can't do this. I'm never enough, or I gotta get myself out of this. When we speak from I as opposed to Louis, you got this. Louis, you are good enough.

Yeah.

So what happens when we come from I?

So I is a signature of being immersed in the experience. And that can lead us down the rabbit hole of rumination and worry and, you know, use your favorite descriptor. I call it all that chatter. Ruminations. When you're. When you're spinning about the past, worries, spinning about the future, in each case you're spinning, you're making yourself nuts. I me, my chatter is all about being so zoomed in on the problem, you can't think about anything else.

What if you use I am, in a powerful sense, I am able to get through this. I am confident. I've put in the work. I am loving. Would that be supportive? Or is it better to still say, louis, you are loving, Louis, you are kind. Louis, you got this?

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, those. The positive affirmations, there's mixed evidence behind them that could be useful in some cases, but less useful but not useful in others. I would suggest trying the. Trying to coach yourself through the problem using your name. Because what it does, it's like a mental time out. It's letting you step back from the situation, and it's broadening your perspective. When we broaden our perspective, we often realize that there's a lot more to the situation than what we're now, than what's making us Looney Tunes. Temporary. Very technical term, by the way.

Looney Tunes crazy. You're almost like you're in a mental tornado that you can't get out of. You're spinning in a loop and you're in a cycle you can't get out of. So wait a minute. You mentioned positive affirmations. That there might be some research that supports it and contradict it. In the world of personal growth and personal development, positive affirmation has been a standard for probably, I don't know, 50 or 100 years. Yeah. What is the science of positive affirmations saying? Currently?

Well, so self affirmations. This idea that I am a good human being, I am worthwhile. I mean, there is some Evidence that that can be useful. But there are other studies that don't show benefits. Not that it backfires, but there's just some variability benefits.

Gotcha right there in the real world. But you're saying I am a person of integrity. Then there's probably a disconnect if you're saying a positive affirmation, but you're not actually being it. Right.

Well, I think that gets to a very profound issue that is useful to talk about here, which is in a lot of the work that we do on trying to figure out how can you help people who are spinning work through it. You're getting them to engage and work through that problem. All right, Ethan, how are you going to manage a situation? It's a situation. What are you going to do? We're not making it. I like to joke when we have people distance in that way or use other techniques and tools. We're not transforming this situation into the culinary equivalent of cupcakes and warm cups of tea. And I don't think we should be. That means we're not making this negative thing into a remarkable positive thing. We're turning the temperature down, allowing people to manage this aversive situation in ways that allow them to then move on. It's not always possible to take something that is totally negative and make it an extreme positive. And I don't know that we would always want to do that really. Because learning from mistakes can be really, really helpful. Like I value.

Isn't there a way to learn from mistakes and not let it consume your energy and make.

That's exactly what we try to do.

Feel exhausted. Something I learned in the last couple years that I wasn't good at this until about two years ago. And the more I practice it, I have found this technique. Maybe there's a term for this tool that you have. I have found this technique to be extremely life changing for me. You talk about the mental time travel. Is that what you mentioned? Yeah, like time travel. Mental time travel. Looking back to see how you overcome something. When I'm going through challenging situations now, especially something that happened a few years ago, there was a challenging situation that I was like, man, this sucks. This really sucks. And it wasn't fun for a few months. I remember saying to myself, the only way that I could get out of it without feeling like pain every day and feeling like taken advantage of and abused and all these things was to say, this is happening in my favor in one year, two years, five years, 10 years out, I'm going to look back and realize oh, this happened so that I could do this in my life, so that I could have a better experience in my relationship, so that I could be a better leader in my business. Yeah, it's almost like future time traveling.

Totally.

And just saying, telling myself over and over, this is happening in my favor. This is happening to support a greater mission in the future. And when I think that way, I'm like, okay, I can handle this.

Yeah. So what you described is not notably. That's not a positive affirmation.

Right.

Like, and in that situation, I'm guess that's the only thing that like, sometimes positive, it's. If we're dealing with true adversity, it's almost. It feels inauthentic to just say everything's gonna be right. What you're describing is exactly mental time travel. Temporal distancing. Temporal distancing is the, the scientific terminology. It's the dorky term. I throw it in there. It's a habit. Sorry. I like it.

Temporal distancing.

Temporal distancing, yeah.

What does temporal mean?

Temporal time. So distancing through time, you can either.

Do that in the past or future or the future.

So take Covid, right. Which has been, I think, tough for many of us, myself included. Right. Temporal distancing is one thing.

It wouldn't be fun being stuck in Michigan, you know, it'd be tough.

Yeah.

I was waiting for when the next dig would come. But don't you worry, we have more time. I will get some digs about land up there.

Actually, it's good. You have more lakes and beautiful scenery than we do.

So nice try.

Go ahead.

So, you know, for Covid, one thing, and I've done several, I use like, I have like a cocktail that I. A non alcoholic cocktail I take, right. With of tools that I use.

Mental tools.

Mental tools, right. Because we've actually done some research on combinations of tools are particularly useful. But for Covid, I think about the future. Like five months from now, we're going to be vaccinated, we're going to go on vacation. The worst part of this will be over. When I do that, I realize that as awful as what I'm going through right now is, it's temporary, it's going to fade. We will get back. That gives me hope. Hope is a powerful way of alleviating chatter.

Really.

Then I'll go back in time too, and I'll think about pandemic of 1918, which was much, much worse than what we were going for. Now it's scarier, probably much scary. We didn't have the medical technology. We didn't have Zoom. We didn't have takeout. Right. Like much much. I mean, takeout. You know I'm joking. But it makes a difference.

Benefit for us people. Yeah.

Yeah. So. And we didn't just get even though it was worse. We got through that and we came roaring back like the roaring twenties economic growth.

True.

So in each future past, I'm broadening my perspective. It's getting me away from, oh, my God, I can't get through another day stuck in this.

Yeah. It's no way out.

It's distancing, and it's a very useful tool.

So you call that temporal distancing?

Yeah, or mental time travel.

Mental time travel. It's like. It's like we need to have mental floss on a daily basis. This is something we were talking about before and how most of us were not taught these tools from our parents, from our friends, from teachers in school, because they weren't training us to teach us these things. And this is what I love about your work, is you talk about preventative mental training, the preventative mental health. I don't know what you call it, but not waiting until you're anxious and depressed and feeling overwhelmed, needing to take a drug to. To calm your mind. But doing these tools on a daily basis. What would you say are three to five things that we could do on a daily basis? Simple strategies to get started to help prevent our mind from taking over.

Okay, so we've already talked about two, so I don't have to go through those.

Give me three more.

Then the distance, self talk, and mental time travel. Let's shift to another category, the way that I like to simplify this whole universe of tools. There are three buckets. Things you could do on your own. Ways of reframing the situation. Simple tools that shift how you think that help you reframe that can be useful. So both tools we talked about are examples of that. Then another category are what we might think as people tools, ways of interacting with others that can help us. Okay, so let's go into that, and then I'll go into the third. People tools are really interesting to me because, A, I'm a social psychologist, so I care about how we interact with one another. But when it comes to chatter, there are some myths out there, so we're gonna have some myth busting right now. So when people experience chatter, they're often intensely motivated to talk about it with other people, to share their emotions, to get help and support. There are a couple of exceptions. If the chatter is around things that we experience shame or embarrassment about, then we don't want to talk. But all the other things, we vent. We vent. We want to find someone. Let. Just let me unload.

Is that good or bad unloading on our friends or family?

Well, it's complicated. And I'll tell you what it doesn't do. It doesn't help us work through our chatter. And it can even make it worse.

By venting to someone, this happened or whatever, or this person did this and complain about it. You're saying it could make it worse. Why? Because they'll say you're right or, well.

So let's say you and I, minus the geographical differences that we share, we're friends, right? So let's say I call you up and, hey, you know, I'm really struggling something. I just. I need your support. Let me help you out. So you start asking me questions about what happened, I start sharing what I felt, and we keep going back and forth. That makes me feel really good about our friendship. I feel really close and connected with you. And research shows that when you vent, that strengthens friendships. Right? But if all we do is harp on what happened and what you felt, in technical terms, that's called co. Rumination. We just ruminate together. I leave that conversation and I'm just as upset as when I started like that. Like, it's still, I'm just throwing. Throwing logs on a burning fire. You're just keeping me going. So, hey, great for our friendship, but I still got the problem I'm having, like, you know, gastric distress over this. Right?

Heart palpitation. Yes.

So instead, the best kinds of conversations, when it comes to managing chatter, they actually do two things. You do need to connect emotionally with someone else. There's value in that.

Empathize with that.

Empathize Critically important, right? But at a certain point in the conversation, the person you're talking to ideally can help you broaden your perspective. You might nudge me to, hey, look at the big picture. Have you dealt with this? Get me to mentally time travel, help put this in perspective. That's the signature of a great conversation.

So first, empathize and listen. Deep listening. Empathize. And then would you say, okay, would you like my feedback or support or.

Some suggestions or some coaching the way, you know. So can I offer you, like, I totally hear you. Do you want to keep going? Or can I offer you some advice and ask genuinely, because I'm a scientist. But in the chapter when I talk about this, I talk about this as being an art. And there is an art to this. It's a dance, right? It's a dance. Because different people may need more time to just vent before they're ready to get into that advice giving and receiving mode. Some people are ready for it right away, others it may take some time. It may depend on the situation. If it's a really nuclear chatter event, right, like then you may need to spend some more time just listening and talking before you can go. But the way you did it is exactly what we'd want to do. But that orientation is very different from hey, let me just vent. And I think there's a really important take home lesson here for people who are listening. Because if you know that there are these two pieces to getting good chatter support from others, that lets us be a lot more deliberate about who we seek out for support. So I was mentioning before, like I've got a board of advisors when it comes to chatter and like three people I go to for personal problems and four for if it's professional, like work related issues. And these are people who I know they will empathize and connect, but then also really help me try to work through the problem. And what's interesting about the people on those two different boards, there are some people who love me a lot and I love them back. And I know this for a fact because like DNA determines it. Close family members, right? I don't go to them about my chatter because I know it doesn't, it doesn't make it better. We just get stuck venting and it doesn't help. So I'm really careful about curating who I go to for support. And then on the flip side, because I know the science, I like to think that I can be a better chatter advisor to others, to my friends and colleagues and students when they come to me, I actually have like a little playbook that tells me like, here's how, here's how I can help. And it's not complicated, right? Two steps, right? Listen deeply, empathize and connect and then start reframing.

Is the brain influencing the body more or is the gut influencing the brain more?

So you could, you know, I've compared this to a central government and local governments in the states and counties. And there's a lot of influence that goes, that comes from the body and that plays a big role in our emotions, you know, emotional states. And as, as I'll talk about, you know, there's a lot of stuff now going on with this low grade immune system activation that we all, most people are now exposed to because of our diet. And, and that's a stream of information that constantly goes to the brain. It, you don't feel, it, you don't, it doesn't hurt, doesn't generate any symptoms, but over time it does change your brain structurally and functionally. So a big influence subliminally that goes to the brain all the time and also big things. So people have said we can't, yes, we can generate artificial intelligence, but it won't have emotions because it doesn't have the body to send this constant signals to it. But then on the other hand, I mean, the brain is obviously the most sophisticated computer in the universe up to now. And it sends signals to the body all the time. There's a part of the nervous system called the autonomic nervous system that reaches pretty much every cell in your body. You have a sensory part, the vagus nerve, that reports anything that goes on anywhere, constantly to the brain. And then the brain as a system to respond to that. And again, it can influence every cell in distinct patterns. It doesn't always kick in because they would be overwhelmed. It kicks in when it's necessary. There's a threat or.

I'm curious about, I don't know if you've studied this, but I'm curious about when human beings look themselves in the mirror and they see themselves and they shape an identity, they perceive an identity and maybe they look chiseled. They're like this Greek God that's just chiseled. They're athletic, but they don't believe they're healthy or fit. For whatever reason their identity has made them look like they're not. They don't love themselves or they don't believe that they look good or whatever it is. Is there anything to play around identity that we shape for ourselves the image of ourself and making us either healthier or more susceptible to diseases or a weakened immune system. Is this, am I out there too much by asking this? But I'm curious.

Yeah. No, no. So I mean, this is definitely something that happens a lot, I mean, to a lot of people that their identity is, it's obviously shaped early on in life. You know, typically there could also be genetic factors, but most of it will happen early in life. The feedback you get from your parents and from your friends, if that's generally positive or, or negative. If it's negative, it can have two effects. One is it can really damage your self identity and your self worth or you can't rebel against it and say I'm not going to accept this. I'm creating my own identity. I think it will have. Almost certainly it does have. I mean, anything that happens in the brain in terms of these emotional or identity. In my own research, I've always been more concerned about the emotional influences on the body. So any emotion that you experience, either chronically or some more of these emotions that are present all the time, background emotions that, that has a mirror image in your body really.

So give me an example. If you're thinking, if you're feeling an emotion of not enough or lack or sick or stress, if you're feeling and thinking that consistently, then the body will mirror that.

The body will mirror it. And so I focus primarily on the gut because it's kind of a unique organ because it has all these other things in it, not just the gut wall, but the immune system and the nervous system of the gut and, and hormonal system. But that will. So this is not separate. You know, this is like just as some people, you look at them and you look at their face and you can tell what's going on. You know, if you're good in that the, you know, the furs between your eyebrows and you know, it's, it's. Unless you're a poker player, you exhibit these emotions in your face. But the same thing happens in every part of your body. You know, your heart and your, I'm not sure about organs like, you know, like the kidneys and the liver, they're not sort of more mechanical devices or chemical devices, not as much these computational as. So the heart also. The heart is basically a pump and you know, but the gut is something that has, is in a different realm. You know, it very sensitive to emotions. And I would say the gut is.

Is that why you feel butterflies, you feel sick when you see something you feel, feel it in your gut?

Yeah. And also this self identity. I'm, you know, quite honestly, before you ask the question, I never even thought about this, but I'm absolutely convinced, I'm fascinated by this. I'm absolutely convinced that your gut has a mirror image of your sense of identity.

Really?

Yeah. I think if you have an inferiority complex, that will affect the gut. And now, you know, since we talked a lot about the gut microbiome that, that lives inside the gut, which communicates very closely with the gut, even that system gets these messages from the brain. And this is different. So if you are threatened by a wild animal, you will have a peak in your stress response and within a couple of seconds or minutes it will go down and be normal again with these, with these background emotions or something like sense of identity that's with you all the time, you know, always.

You're always thinking and feeling like I'm not enough or imposter syndrome or something.

And it's, it's ingrained in your, your unconscious. You know, it comes out in your dreams.

So what does, what does that do to the, the body or the immune system if you're kind of constantly thinking these things or have a belief system that I'm not enough or comparing to someone else or something else or in lack or in scarcity, what does that do to the immune system? The gut, the body?

Yeah, so I'm talking about the immune system. If you have this, you know, I talked about this acute threat, this acute emotion of an acute stress, it will temporarily increase the activity of your immune system because like spike up cortisol or.

Something.

Of your stress system. But if it's chronic, it has a totally different effect on it, often the opposite effect. And it will. I mean, there's many studies coming out on this now. You know that even early adverse life events that play a big role in shaping this identity have been found to have an effect on the gene expression pattern in your immune cells and some of your immune cells, which in an adult person. So you can. There's a memory in these immune cells that reflects what happened to you at.

Age of, you know, 5, 7, 9, whatever.

And that obviously shapes. When these immune cells are called into action, that shapes the immune response.

There's a trigger that you'll feel when you see something that reflects what you went through.

Right. So there's a memory, there's an immune memory. I mean, there's clearly also this brain memory in our unconscious. It's probably the way the body is organized, that some of the systems, particularly the nervous system and immune system, can form these memories that then later really influence many functions in your body and also your behavior. The.

So how do we, how do we heal these things? If we have this memory of something from the past in our immune system or in our DNA and our cells, how do we heal or move beyond it so it doesn't hold us back?

Well, there's different ways. There's some people that do this on their own, you know, they pull themselves out of it. There's other people that go into psychoanalysis. So I mentioned in my first book, you know, I went through Jungian dream analysis for several years at some point in my life during sort of an existential crisis. And Found that extremely helpful. Connecting to. I mean, just watching your dreams for a while and realize some are recurring. I mean, those are the ones that obviously have a big influence on. Because they're there all the time. And so if you mention every night, you know, these experiences are recalled and even during your sleep affect systems within your body. So that's another way. There's ways. Today, cognitive behavioral therapy doesn't deal with the roots of it. They just change your behavior. It's another way of dealing with it. So forget about reversing or patching up what happened early on. And then there's the most modern way. It's the psychedelics. I'm not an expert on this, but I've gotten really interested in that for a variety of reasons. Because when I first came to UCLA for training, I was fascinated by this whole counterculture. You know, there were workshop in Esalen and organized by the Ojai foundation. And I listened to many of these leading figures at the time, you know, giving these workshops. And so this was in the. In the early 70s, you know, and they. Well, early 80s, I say, when I experienced it. And they talked about, you know, psychoanalysis with LSD or with ketamine, and. And then it was completely, you know, closed off for science for decades. And now it's coming back rapidly, you know, and there's some fascinating stuff coming out. I've, you know, and also in my travels during college in South America, I've stayed with some of these tribes on the Orinoco river. And they use, you know, the same substitute substance to what's ayahuasca.

Yeah.

And we've seen, you know, how they get into these trans states. And so now, you know, fast forward 35, 40 years, I find that fascinating that this is now back in the mainstream, you know, and it will. So this is just a way of removing the control. If you say it in a simplistic way, removing the control that we have about prefrontal cortex to suppress these things, you loosen that control and then this stuff will bubble up, maybe very painful. I think you shouldn't do it without a guidance of an experienced, you know, shaman or psychotherapist. But that's another way of processing. And now the majority of people go through life without ever dealing with this. You know, they get sick, they get their heart attack, diabetes. They never think about this, you know, so it's. Wow.

I'm curious about the gut. What is. When you say the gut, what is included in that? What are all the elements of gut?

Yeah. So let's start with when I went to medical school. The gut was basically the digestive organ.

The digestive organ.

So something that we know very well from the esophagus, the stomach, the small intestine, large intestine. Each of those regions has a special task. And the ultimate goal, we thought, is the breaking down of food into absorbable and you know, components that are then provide the nutrients for our body. That was the thought. But then, you know, when I came to UCLA as initially as a research fellow, worked in a lab late John Walsh, and so they found at the time that there were molecules in the gut that some didn't fit that. That description. You know, there were, there were neurotransmitters and so make a long story short.

Transmitters from the brain to the gut.

Same molecules, there's some endoreceptors. And then people thought about why is that? And it was the discovery of a nervous system in the gut. You know, 150 million neurons that are there and very similar in their 150.

Million neurons in the gut, in a gut sandwiched.

So if you look at a gut, you wouldn't see it. Gut has several layers, and in between these layers there's a net of nerve cells that wraps around it. But because the gut is so long, it adds up with the numbers, the main function of that system is really to completely regulate the gut. In an animal model, you can take out the gut, put it in a test tube, and this gut will still have the same functions, peristalsis and secretion as it has when it's connected to the rest of the body.

You can put it in a tube and it'll still process food, it'll still run it through the same way. So what does that tell us?

So it tells us that gut, or this little gut in the brain is really the primary regulator of our gut functions, the digestive functions. But then there was another sort of realization that these same transmitters were also present within the brain as in the gut. That caused a lot of surprise that why would you have that? Then again, the long story, the evolution in evolution. We started out the most stringent organisms with that gut brain. And then gradually as animals, this was marine creatures, tiny marine creatures in the oceans as we, as in evolution, polar animals develop with a head. Then some of these nerves migrated to the head and formed the beginning of the central nervous system. And then there was some division of labor at some point that before the gut, brain did everything because there was no head and no other functions, no other organs. So later our big Brains then took over the regulation, the response to the environment, the coordination of organs within the body and the digestive side was left to the brain in the gut nervous system. But that means there's a very intimate relationship between these two, more than with any other organ in the body. Clearly the heart gets a lot of signals from the brain when we're stressed or the blood vessels, the blood pressure goes up, but it's nothing compared to what goes on in this multi lane highway between the brain and the gut really. So. And yeah, I would say so A lot of people then think are our emotions processed by the guts nervous system or that's probably not the case. I think there's still the more sophisticated things happen at the brain level. But there's this constant signal in a bi directional way that like when we.

See something or we feel triggered or we see a threat or see something we like or we don't like and then we feel it in our gut. Is it first processed through the eyes into the brain and then connects down to the gut or as we see something and it goes from the gut up to the brain?

No, I would say this happens first in the brain and within milliseconds signal down instant.

Right.

And as you said, it can be good or bad, you know this arousal mechanism.

Yeah, it can be pleasure or pain or stress. Right?

Yeah, it can be. You go on your first date and you have people talk about butterflies in their stomach and it can be when you have to give a speech the first time you're nervous or an actor, you know, so it's, it's the same, the same mechanism, it's, it's, it's value neutral, you know, that arousal. But then there's also emotion specific signals, you know, that happen that so anger, anxiety, we don't know about something like jealousy, that hasn't really been studied. But anger and fear, that has been studied. We know exactly the patterns that happen in every level of the gut when we have these emotions. And one of the reasons that these emotions hang around for a long time, it's not like you can turn them off anger. So some people train themselves to have more equanimity and not get carried away by the anger. But a lot of people that anger sticks with them or the fear and then that's because it reverberates in these gut circuits in between the gut and the brain and sets up this vicious cycle. And the brain cannot easily shut it off unless you train it, train yourself to do it.

How do you train yourself to let go of anger.

Well, it's a lot of the meditative techniques of mindfulness that you.

It's the practice, it doesn't happen overnight. It's like a practice of doing it over and over.

It's the practice. You experience that emotion and you train yourself to let it go, to see.

It float away, not hold on to it. You studied Buddhism for a while as well, right?

Yeah. This is something I've always been fascinated by. Looking back, I don't even know why I was interested. It's probably my own personal issues, you know, but that stuck with me, that interest. And I find now more than ever the, the wisdom that is in these Buddhist concepts both in terms of emotional regulation. I mean, who would have thought that mindfulness based stress reduction would become a, you know, a commonly used, like a household name, you know, or an app. When I was first interested, it was an esoteric thing. People say, crazy Buddhism, the last decade.

Has become the mainstream mindfulness meditation.

And that all has to do with these concepts that we just talked about. To train yourself not to be stuck with these emotions. Because these emotions that if they hang around, as we now said several times, it's not just within your brain, they circulate through your body, your whole body. And it has. It's a very unhealthy situation to be in that state.

No one taught me how to deal with overcoming heartache. No one taught me how to deal with the insecurities inside of my heart. No one taught me how to manage my finances and the mindset of money. No one taught me about truly how to maximize my nutrition and my sleep and my meditation practice. No one taught me these things in school.