The Daily Techniques To UNLOCK THE POWER Of Your Mind! | Lewis Howes

And in an age of information, ignorance is a choice.

They could have the reasons and purpose, they could have the energy, unlimited energy, but they don't know where to start. A journey of a thousand miles is made up of, you know, single steps, but the key is to reward the harder steps, not the easier ones and not the ones where you get the thing that you want.

Our minds can be so powerful, but we are often limited by our way of thinking. That's why in this video, I'm talking with the top brain experts in the world about how to unlock the power of your mind. This will change your life. -Does the mind have 100% power over what the body feels?

-No. -But it doesn't mean that it doesn't have a significant control over it.

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

To some extent you can. So I think the question that you're asking is a very important one. It's actually the question, which is to what extent does our subjective narrative- the.

Story we tell ourselves.

The story we tell ourselves actually mean something for the body. And to what extent does the body actually mean something for the subjective narrative? So this gets into some areas of work that we're doing now. And so I do want to highlight that it's ongoing work. But I think, you know, the old narrative, meaning a few 10 years ago, was that if you're feeling depressed, just smile. Well, if that worked, we would have a lot less depression than we see out there.

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. To answer your question, can you think your way out of the ice bath being cold? So, a couple of things that are important. First of all, just to go a little deeper on what thoughts are. Thoughts happen spontaneously all the time. They're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection. But thoughts can also be deliberately introduced. For instance, right now, I can say, okay, have a thought that just decide to write your name and you can do that. I'm going to decide to write my name and you can do it. So, that's a deliberate thought which says that you can introduce thoughts. So, I think it's very hard to control negative thoughts directly by trying 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 gonna keep popping in.

Right.

So how do we deliberately have a positive thought more often?

Right. So I'm a big fan of wellness and I think it's a great community, but it tends to run in absolutes and there aren't a lot of operational definitions, as we say, in science. And what I love about your questions, you're asking for, really getting to the meat of things, asking for the operational definitions. One of the most dangerous ideas in wellness and in popular psychology is that your body hears every thought you have. What a terrible thing to put on people. Wow. What a challenging thing. I don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts. I think there is great value, however, to introducing positive thought schemes. Now, the reason is not because I think it's just because I think so, but because there's actually a neurochemical basis for controlling stress and actually making stress more tolerable and extending one's ability to be in bouts of effort. And that relates to the dopamine pathway. So the molecule dopamine is a reward. It's released in the brain when you win a game, you close a deal, you meet the love of your life, someone likes your photo, the great love of your life, you complete something. But most of our dopamine release is not from achieving goals. It's actually released when we are en 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 loved doing it and it incidentally or not so incidentally, these kids are fantastic at math when there is a right answer because they they feel some sense of reward from the effort process. Now, the cool thing about dopamine is that it's very subjectively controlled. We can all learn to secrete dopamine in our brain in response to things that are in a purely subjective way.

Our interpretation.

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

They're taking a step.

They're taking a step. If they can reward that process internally, two things happen. First of all, the brain circuits that are associated with building subjective rewards and dopamine get stronger, so you get better at that process. And second, and most importantly, dopamine has an amazing ability to buffer adrenaline and buffer epinephrine. And what I mean by that is there was a study that was published in the journal Cell, excellent journal, Cell Press journal, a couple of years ago showing that with repeated bouts of effort we use and we release more and more epinephrine. It's kind of adrenaline but in the brain. With more effort, we're going to get more epinephrine. Every time you put in effort. So every time you make, for this, let's keep it, if I could were to keep it in the business context, every time you make write that email, every time you, let's say it's a person who's a craftsman or a crafts woman, every time you're working.