Ultimate Guide to Holistic Health: 3 KEYS to Controlling the Mind & RESETTING Your Nervous System

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That's a great question. The short answer is the body has a huge and profound influence on our mind. And the reason is that we We often talk about the brain and we think the brain, the brain, the brain. The brain is important, but the brain and the spinal cord, which makes up what we call the central nervous system, are extensively connected with the body and the body is extensively connected with the.

Brain and spinal cord. So the spinal cord is connected to the brain. That's right. In the back. It comes up the neck and the.

Actual nerves are connected inside of your brain. That's right. Go all the way down to lower back. Yeah, so basically we are a big tube or our nervous system is a big tube. So your brain obviously is the thing that's shaped more or less like this and then the spinal cord extends off the back and all that is housed in skull except for two pieces of the brain which are the eyes, which are actually two pieces of the brain that are outside the skull. The eyes are a part of the brain. They are absolutely a part of the brain. They are central nervous system. So it's eyes, brain, and spinal cord, they're all connected. They're all connected.

If you took that out of the body, let's say, they would all be.

Connected in some way. That's right. They're contiguous, as we say. They're just one unit. They're one piece. That's right. And sometimes they get challenged, people say, the eyes aren't part of the brain. Well, then that means that the spinal cord is part of the brain too. And I want to be really clear, this is not semantics. There is a genetic program that ensures that early in development, during the first trimester, when we were all in our mother's womb, the bellies, the retinas, the neural retinas and eyes were deliberately pushed out of the skull. And the reason you have those eyes outside your skull is so that you can evaluate things at a great distance from you, right? Because otherwise everything would have to be in contact with you. Other animals do this mainly using smell. We are very visually driven. So a lot of our genome is devoted to vision and understanding what's going on at a distance from us. And that's afforded us a huge evolutionary advantage. To survive. To survive, because the more that I can anticipate events at a distance, the more that I could coordinate with my environment like daytime and nighttime, but also when objects are coming at me or things I want to chase and kill, or you think about mating behavior and hunter-gatherer behavior, all of that, evaluating faces and facial expressions without actually having to come into contact with people afford a huge evolutionary advantage. But I want to make sure that I answer your question thoroughly. The nervous system includes the brain, which we now know includes the eyes as well, the spinal cord, and then what's called the peripheral nervous system, all the connections with the body, and every organ in our body, our heart, our diaphragm, our lungs, our spleen, our liver, all of it is, as we say, innervated. It receives nerve connections. To the brain? That's right, from the brain and spinal cord. So much so that if we were to just dissolve away everything except the nervous system, if we had a human nervous system splayed out here on the table in front of us, in front of us, it would look like a human being. There would be a connection at every level down to, you'd be able to say, that's the big toe and that's the pinky and that's where the heart would belong because it's almost like a silhouette of our entire body. And so when we think about the nervous system, it's really important, I think, for people to understand that the nervous system is all of that, brain and body and all the connections back and forth. And, you know, there have been thousands of years of debates about what's the mind, what's the brain, et cetera, the mind-body problem, all that. I think it's fair to say in 2020, that states of mind include the brain, the activity of the brain and the body. Those two things coordinate the brain and the body and have a sort of what I call a contract. There's a brain-body contract that gives rise to things like states of mind. So, a feeling of depression or a feeling of awe or excitement or happiness.

Which is a state of mind is what I'm hearing you say.

Yeah, we could talk about why.

An emotional experience is a state of mind.

That's right. I prefer to talk about states and states of mind because they include the brain and body. So just by saying mind, I don't mean just brain, they include the brain and body and also because- so when.

You say sorry to interrupt, but brain and body mean thought and feeling.

Yeah, so you're asking the key questions. Emotions are very hard to describe in an objective way, whereas states have certain properties that allow us to study them in different laboratories and from one experiment to the next. So some people may have heard this before, but we really the brain does really five things. We have sensation, which is, you know, we're constantly being bombarded with sound waves and light and smells and things. And that stuff is ongoing and you can't negotiate that. It's just you have these receptors in your body that allow you to evaluate those things. A sea turtle has magnetoreception. It can navigate by magnetic fields. We cannot do that. But they can because they sense it. Infrared vision in a pit viper or something. Unless you put on night vision goggles, you can't do that. Then there's perception, which is which sensations you are paying attention to. As you write with your pen, if I say, what does that pen feel like in your hand? Now you're perceiving it. But the sensation was always there. Those receptors were always sensing it.

So the sensation being the actual feeling, the actual visual, the perception is your interpretation of the feeling.

I would say that the perceptions are where your attention is, which sensations you're attending to. And then you have thoughts. And thoughts get a little complicated for us to parse because they are a little bit abstract. But thoughts are a combination of our perception, whatever it is we're attending to, and they have context memory. They're tapped into our memory systems. Because if I say a pen and you're like, I don't know what your relationship to pens is, but mine is kind of a trivial one. I write with one. But let's say I come from a family that, I don't know, had a pen factory in Germany in the 1930s. series, then there's a whole.

Or you got stabbed by a pen.

You got stabbed by a pen.

Right.

So it's very contextual. So thoughts are like perceptions, but they.

Carry memory and context.

Thoughts are memory and context. Yeah, they include that. And then there are feelings slash emotions. And this is where it really starts to get abstract and kind of hazy and where there's still a lot of debate. Because, for instance, if I ask you how you're feeling and you say, I feel Most people say, I feel good. Well, what does that mean? I mean, that's not a feeling. So if you ever do personal development work, they're always like, don't use a, don't say good or bad. What do you feel? And people say, well, I feel calm and excited or something like, you know, when it, and it starts becoming very abstract. And so emotions are a real thing, and they certainly, perhaps more than anything else, recruit the brain and the body. When we feel depressed, we, we occupy certain postures, we feel it in our gut, we feel it in our limbs, we can feel fatigue, we can feel anxious, and so that emotions are really where you capture that mind, the brain-body contract and relationship very, very intensely. And then the fifth thing is actions. And what I love about actions and behaviors is they are very concrete. You're writing with your pen now, I'm speaking, I'm moving my hands, you can measure those things, you can analyze them, we know exactly what the neural pathways are. So we've got sensation, perception, emotions and actions. Thoughts, yep. And then of course beneath all that, you've got memories and people always like to raise intuition. You know, they always say, what about that sixth thing, intuition? And we could talk about intuition, but the reason I like to talk about states and the reason we study states in my lab is that states have two properties that are easy to study somewhat compared to emotions. And that's how pervasive they are, meaning how long lasting they are. States tend to have a beginning, a middle and an end, whereas emotions, it's sort of like they're more in combination. States are more like the primary colors from which you mix all that you get all the emotions. And the other thing is that they have an intensity that we can measure. You can have a state of being very alert or very drowsy or asleep.

And you can say from a one to 10, how are you feeling in this state?

That's right. And we can measure- It's that experience. That's right. And we can correlate it with things like heart rate, heart rate variability, breathing speed, sweating, levels of neural activity in brain areas that control wakefulness. And so, I will be the first to say that I would love to be able to say that in my laboratory we are studying or someday we'll study awe and flow and all those things. But those are higher up on the ladder than we can get to right now. I think with the current technology, we can understand states and from there, I do believe that we can make a significant dent into certain mental health issues and optimize performance in certain communities that are trying to optimize performance and in the general public. But the states that we're focused on are very concrete. For instance, alert and focused. That would be a wonderful state to understand and be able to direct ourselves toward when we're not feeling alert and focused. How to get into that state. We could talk about tools for that if you like. sleep. Sleep is so powerful and so important. I think now people really understand the extent to which it's important in large part because of Matt Walker's book, why We Sleep, and the important work that he's done in his lab at Berkeley and many other labs as well, of course. So focus, sleep, creativity, stress, these are the kind of core states that we would like to tackle first because we believe we can. And then hopefully in my career, but if not in my career, then maybe one of my scientific offspring or another laboratory, you know, 10, 20, 100 years from now, we'll be able to understand things like how does one get into a state of empathy? Like, I mean, we could spend the whole hour talking about empathy, but it's hard and it's a fascinating topic and it's so important, but it's just very hard to understand at a neural level. So we're starting with the basics, with the confidence that by understanding those basics, they will build up to richer representations and understanding of things like Empathy someday?

Would you need to be studying the heart as well to understand empathy or does it all come from the mind?

That's a great question. To understand any state, we believe that you have to study the brain and the spinal cord and the body. So, in my lab, we talk about being neuroscientists. For me, that means we study the nervous system, the whole thing. So, people who come into my laboratory, we put them into VR environments that simulate some experience. and I realize it's not as real as being in the actual experience in the real world, but you get enough presence, especially because it's very visually and auditorily rich in those environments, people get what's called presence. They forget that they're in a VR environment, at least for moments. And in that time, we're measuring heart rate variability, we're measuring sweating, we're measuring, in many cases, we also have electrodes lowered into their brain because we do this with neurosurgery patients. And so we have access to the brain, we have access to the body, and it's really by recording from all these areas of the brain and body that we can get a fuller understanding of what a state of, say, focus or stress or anxiety really is. If we were just looking in one little corner of the brain or just at the heart, we wouldn't be able to do that. And so that's a kind of a centerpiece of our lab is that brain and body, the whole nervous system, is key. You got to look at all of it.

With feelings. I want to talk about feelings and emotions for a second. Can a person make it so they never get depressed? They never react to their perception, their people's actions towards them where they never get to a state of, ah, I don't feel good. I'm feeling more depressed. I'm in a dark place now. I'm stuck in this place. Is there a way that we could ever defend ourselves against negative stressors, negative emotions? Or are we just, do we need them as well to have contrast in life?

Well, there's sort of two views on this. I'll reveal mine after I sort of explain the two views. One is that these states, I guess I'm automatically calling things like depression a state of mind, a state of body. So when I say state of mind, I mean brain and body.

Because your body is really feeling, it's like the brain is connected to the body. And so if you're saying internally a thought of like, I'm depressed, I don't feel good, or I'm sad, or lonely, or I'm not good enough, the body's gonna react. Is that what I'm understanding? Absolutely. The body's going to manifest what the mind is telling you. Absolutely.

The thought, the idea, you're gonna be like, I'm sad, I'm not good enough, you're gonna shrink. Right. Is that right? That's right. I mean, there are really two forms of depression. Sometimes they're intermixed, but one is anxiety associated depression, and if you've ever experienced it, or for anyone that's experienced it, they feel agitation in their body. and their mind races, but in their body. So the body is recruited. There are also depressive states that people feel very fatigued and exhausted, and overwhelmed, and they also experience that in their body. The idea of getting out of bed in the morning is hard, motivating to exercise, doing the sorts of things that we know are powerful for pushing back on depression. So the body is recruited I think most people would say that depressive states are bad when they bring down the baseline on life. Just as a brief aside, anytime there's a question about mental health or addiction or trauma or anything, one could look at it and make up some argument of, well, evolutionarily, this makes sense. We all get depressed, but we have to be fair to the person experiencing it, of course, and have sensitivity that some behaviors will keep the baseline of our life steady, meaning job, relationships, etc., will continue as they are. Other activities will tend to improve the baseline on our life. Job, activities, relationship, etc., will improve. And then there's some things like heroin, which very quickly we can predict that very quickly the baseline on life is going to creep down regardless of who that person is. So people say, Can you get addicted to water? Well, maybe, but I have to drink a lot of water. before the baseline on my life starts to go down.

So, sure, it feels uncomfortable.

That's right.

It's like, man, I'm so bloated. Exactly.

So, we tend to throw around things like addiction and depression a little loosely. So, I think that it's fair to say that depression is wired into us as a possible state that we can all fall into, but that it's very important, in my opinion, that humans have tools to remove themselves from that state, of course, to avoid tragedies like suicide, but also because when the baseline on someone's life goes down far enough, they find it increasingly hard to do the sorts of things that didn't get them out of depression. So you or I could say- so.

They stay in that state of depression because it's too hard to go work. It's too hard to change my habit of eating healthier. So I'm going to stay, I'm going to keep eating ice cream, which is going to make my body depressed. That's right.

Right?

If I keep eating bad foods, if I keep staying up till 4:00 a.m., if I keep staying in a toxic relationship, I want to feel depressed.

That's right. And eventually, because of this very inseparable relationship between the brain and body, eventually what happens is that because the brain controls the body, but also the body can control the brain, people lose the ability to intervene in this depressive process. So you or I could say, look, if someone who's depressed, what they need to do is get up early, get some light in their eyes, get some movement. I know you've put this information out there, which I love, because these, Those tips are grounded in, they're not even tips, they're really tools. And they're very powerful because they're grounded in excellent science. You get that dopamine release early in the day that's anti-depressive. You time your sleep better when you get sun in your eyes and you get movement early in the day. For most people, that's accessible and they absolutely should be doing it. Everyone should be doing that. But for people who are far enough down that path of depression, Because the body and the mind have this relationship that's so close, there is a crossover point where they really can't do those activities.

Because they're so far deep into depression.

The body won't do what they decide to do. And so, now I'm not trying to give anyone a pass because ultimately we are all responsible for our own mental health, certainly adults more than kids, but we're all responsible for our own mental health and only we can direct our own brain changes. That's the stinger. once we're 25 years and older, we are the only ones that can change our brain. And we can talk about neuroplasticity if you like, but the depressed person has to take responsibility for their behavior. But this is why it's so important to catch this brain-body relationship early and build routines that keep one out of depression. So that was a long path back to answer your question succinctly, I hope, which is, We can stay out of depression, but we have to keep depression at bay by doing things regularly. The same way we can stay out of obesity by eating the right foods in the right times and ratios and things of that sort. But once one is obese, there are massive endocrine changes, type 2 diabetes that make it hard to eat correctly. Right. Right. So there's this- It's hard to get out of it.

It's hard to go back to a healthy state.

That's right. Once your insulin is dysregulated, you're hungry all the time, so it's much harder.

To control your hunger. Now, you have to have so much discipline and willpower to, I guess, break through and try to get back to a healthier state.

That's right. Is that right?

It's possible, is what I'm hearing you say.

Absolutely.

But it's really, really hard.

That's right.

So is depression a disease then? Are people who have certain brain chemistry that are born differently with their brains that are just more depressed, or is it possible to get out of that state if you have the functionality to think, to act, to move, to create routines and habits for yourself, is that possible?

Yeah, there are some genetic predispositions to depression, and there are certainly familial circumstances where, you know, trauma and challenge that can head people down that path. I think, you know, one of the reasons I'm involved in public education about neuroscience is I want people to understand the nervous system, and I want them to understand that there are tools that can allow them to intervene in their thoughts and feelings and most of the time those involve bringing in behaviors and the actual actions, which are very concrete. And the reason is the following. It's very hard to control the mind just using thinking. It's just using the mind. Just thinking. It's very hard to, you know, if someone's stressed out and you say, Calm down, it doesn't work. Telling ourselves, Calm down, doesn't work.

So it's like, what's a tool?

Breathe. Right. So a specific walk outside for a walk. A specific tool, right? And when it comes to depression and emotions, I mean, it's very hard to talk oneself out of an emotional state is just very challenging.

Very hard.

That's right.

It's like when I talk to my girlfriend and she's just like, she's not happy about something and she gets on a tangent. I'm like, there's nothing I can say to calm her down. There's nothing I can say to someone who's emotional about an idea in the moment until I'm like, okay, let's talk later. Otherwise, me trying to tell them to relax, no, it's not what it's counterproductive. It's not what, you know, it's not the truth.

That's not what you're thinking or whatever. It's kind of reactive, right? Makes them more emotional. Well, that's because these states, like these emotional states of mind, they they recruit the whole nervous system. So we are actually a different- It's.

Your whole body is out of control.

Your mind, your body, like for instance, if you're angry, upset or stressed, your pupils dilate. This is subconscious. As a consequence of that, you view the world in kind of like portrait mode, not panoramic, excuse me, portrait mode on your phone where the thing that's upsetting you is in sharper focus and everything else is blurry. So you actually see the world differently. In addition to that, the timing, your perception of time, excuse me, is now faster so that things outside you seem to be moving more slowly in comparison to how you feel inside. You've experienced this if you were ever in line at the airport or something and it's taking a long time and you're about to miss your flight, it seems like the person in front of you is moving very slowly.

They're taking forever.

Yeah, but time is time. It's moving at the same rate regardless. When you're very calm or let's say you're fatigued, let's say you're exhausted, you didn't sleep well the night before. Things in front of you are going to seem like they're moving really fast or saying take off your shoes, putting them on the conveyor belt. It's kind of overwhelming. -Slow down here. -That's right, because your internal clock is moving more slowly. And so, these states of mind when someone's upset, they recruit their entire being, their way of being. And so, one of the reasons why I mentioned that sensation, perception, feeling, thought and action before is that the actions are very concrete. And because of this reciprocal relationship between the brain and body, brain connects to body, body connects to brain, we know that when the mind isn't where we want it to be, we need to use the body to intervene.

What does that mean?

So there are two ways that you can shift your brain state quickly. You mentioned one already, which is respiration or breathing. And the reason is there's a direct connection from the brain to an organ in our body called the diaphragm, which is skeletal muscle. The diaphragm is designed to move the lungs up and down, bring in more oxygen, expel more oxygen. And it's unlike other organs like the heart or the spleen or the liver because it's actually made up of what's called striated muscle, just like a bicep, tricep or quadricep. It can be voluntarily controlled. You can't voluntarily control your heart directly right now.

Like you can't say speed up and speed it up. Slow down. Or slow it down. You can slow down your breathing. And you can slow down the way you think about things, I'm assuming, or change your thought to something else to help you be more relaxed.

That's right. So one of the reasons why breathing is such a powerful tool for shifting one's state is that A, it's always available for voluntary control. It's just right there. I can decide right now to do three inhales or I can just go back to breathing reflexively. I can just do that in any moment. So the neural real estate, which is in the brainstem that controls breathing, is in a unique position because it's at the kind of boundary between conscious control and unconscious control. I can't do that for my digestion. I can't do that for most everything that happens internally. The other thing is that breathing controls our level of alertness very dramatically. So the faster you breathe, generally, the more alert you are. The slower you breathe, the more calm you're gonna be.

The faster you breathe, meaning shorter, quick breaths, or either way.

So, we're just to take a brief adventure through the neuroscience of breathing and how it relates to brain states. And there's some fun tools in here, so forgive me for this tangent, but you have two brain areas that are responsible for breathing. One is called for the Aficionados, the pre-butt singer complex. It was discovered by Jack Feldman at UCLA. It's named after a bottle of wine, so now you people won't forget it. And it controls rhythmic breathing. so inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. It's just rhythmic breathing. There's another brain area that controls breathing, which is near what's called the parafacial nucleus, which involves breathing anytime there are double inhales or double exhales or triple inhales. You say, well, why would you have this second brain area for breathing? Well, it turns out when you're speaking or crying or coughing, you need to coordinate your breathing with your speaking, and that means sometimes you need to take multiple inhales or multiple exhales, and this is all happening very, very fast. You don't notice. But there's a very important discovery that was made a few years ago by Jack's lab and by a guy named Mark Krasnow at Stanford who discovered there's a set of neurons in your brainstem, mind brainstem, everybody's brainstem, and every animal, every mammal's brainstem. It's a very small number of neurons that controls a specific pattern of breathing, which are called physiological sighs. So these are not just sighs where you go and exhale. These are sighs that involve doing two inhales, and then an extended exhale.

We all do this.

You do this during sleep. Anytime carbon dioxide levels in your bloodstream get too high in order to get more oxygen into your system. People also do this if they've been crying or sobbing, they'll do this and then they'll exhale.

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So what's happening with these physiological sighs and why is this powerful? So your lungs are two big bags of air, but they actually are made up of a ton of little sacks of air called alveoli of the lungs. When we are exercising or when we are sleeping or anytime we're doing anything, these little sacks of air eventually start to collapse. And what happens is carbon dioxide builds up in our system and we experience that as stress. We actually feel the impulse to breathe because carbon dioxide levels get too high. They're neurons that sense carbon dioxide. And then without realizing it, you do the double inhale and then exhale. Typically, the inhales are done through the nose and the exhale is done through the mouth. So it looks like... And why the second inhale? Well, if you've ever tried to blow up a balloon for a kid at a kid's party or just blown up a balloon, Sometimes blow into that empty balloon and it doesn't go in at all. What do you do? You do two and then it pops open. So these double inhales pop open the alveoli of the lungs. They don't explode them, but they pop them open, which pulls carbon dioxide out of the bloodstream, brings oxygen and then you offload carbon dioxide. So if you watch a dog right before it takes a nap or something, it often will do these. Now what's cool about these physiological sighs is from work in our lab and that's still ongoing, I just want to say it's still ongoing, but work in other labs as well, Double inhales followed by an extended exhale are the fastest way that I'm aware of to bring the mind and the body into a more relaxed state.

No way.

Really? Yeah.

It's the fastest way. So if I'm stressed, I'm overwhelmed, just do a three or two.

Two inhales through the nose and then exhale slow through the mouth. One to three of those repeated will bring your level of autonomic arousal down basically to baseline.

What's the autonomic?

It's called autonomic arousal. Sorry. What was it? Sorry. So the autonomic nervous system, it just means automatic. And it's a misnomer because as I'm describing, it's not all automatic. I'm sorry. So autonomic arousal is kind of your level of alertness or your level of calm. People sometimes call it sympathetic nervous system, parasympathetic. I avoid sympathetic parasympathetic because sympathetic sounds like sympathy. And then people think it means calm and nice. when it actually means stress and for anxiety. Sympathetic is stress.

Exactly. The naming.

Parasympathetic is non-stress. That's right. And those names have to do with the anatomy and the locations of the neurons involved in it. But I think for anyone that experiences anxiety from time to time, which is everybody, knowing that you can consciously take control over these neurons that control the ratio of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the lungs, et cetera, even if you don't remember any of that, it's just two inhales through the nose, What you're trying to do is maximally inflate those little sacs in your lungs and then exhale long through the mouth because you're.

Blowing off carbon dioxide. I heard you do a, does it matter the cadence because you did a.

Long deep breath and then a shorter? Not so much. That's just your style. Yeah, you're just trying to fill those as big as you can. So the advice that we hear of take a deep breath or just exhale is sort of right but it doesn't capture this neural circuit. So a lot of what my lab is focused on, because there's so many great labs and people doing great stuff in the breathwork community, Patrick McKeown, Brian McKenzie, they're all these incredible people doing this work, Wim Hof. But my lab's been mainly focused on what is the neural machinery that controls these brain body states. And the reason these physiological sides work is partially because you offload carbon dioxide, you re-inflate the lungs so when the body has oxygen, it's happy. When it doesn't have oxygen, it gets stressed. But the other reason is the most direct and fastest connection between the brain and body for controlling your state of mind is what's called the phrenic nerve, P-H-R-E-N-I-C. The phrenic nerve connects these neurons that I'm referring to in these two brain centers that control breathing with the diaphragm. A lot of people get excited about the vagus nerve, and I'm not out to punish the vagus nerve or the vaginistas, but the truth is the vagus nerve is a very slow system for calming the brain and body. It's called the rest and digest pathway. People are engaging their vagus all the time when they eat a big meal. When the stomach is distended, it sends a signal to the brain that, oh, I have enough food. It's time to rest and digest. But eating, first of all, if you're only using food as a way to control your stress. That's not a good habit. It's not a good habit. You'll be depressed once that's right. People have learned long ago, thousands of years ago, that the best way to suppress a cortisol response is with carbohydrates. carbohydrates because it blunts cortisol. But this is why people eat carbohydrate-rich.

Foods when they're stressed.

And when cortisol is spiked, what happens? So, every morning when you wake up, there's a cortisol spike. That's a good cortisol spike.

It's a stress spike, right?

It's like a- It's a good one. It's the one that wakes you up out of sleep and you want that early in the day. So, you're not just groggy all day, right? That's right. Okay, cortisol has important positive health-promoting functions. There's a signature of depression and anxiety, however, that the psychiatrists know about, which is a 9:00 p.m. cortisol spike. For people who are depressed, there's a second spike of cortisol late in the day. And that's problematic and is associated with.

A lot of mental health issues.

Cortisol is a stress hormone, is that right? Cortisol is a stress hormone. So you have your adrenal glands, which are right above your kidneys in your lower back, and they have two parts to it. They release adrenaline, which is also called epinephrine. And adrenaline is what makes you feel agitated. If you're calm, you're walking along, you look at your phone and there's a troubling text message, you immediately have focus, energy and alertness.

Is the brain connected to those then and it sends a signal to each other?

That's right. And then it affects the body. That's right. The body feels it. That's right.

So adrenaline is liberated into the body.

Very fast in less than a second, 500 milliseconds. You see something, you're reacting to it. Boom. That's right. And it recruits a set of neurons that live right in the core of your body. They then send a signal out to your body and all of a sudden you feel like you want to move. Let's go. The stress is just, it's going to dilate your pupils, cue your alertness and make you agitated and want to move. The body is pretty fascinating. It's really fascinating. And you want this because, you know, the other night I was taking a hike. I was out here a couple days ago and taking a hike in Topanga and I saw a shadow. I looked down and it didn't move. It was a snake. It wasn't a rattlesnake. But still, all that happened in less than a second, right? And these are primitive pathways designed to get you to your alertness. My night vision is so-so, but all of a sudden I felt like I could see clearly and you just, that's adrenaline. Cortisol is a bit more slow-acting. So when that adrenaline is up over and over and over again for days and days, cortisol starts getting liberated also from the adrenals. It comes from other places too, but mainly from the adrenals. And the cortisol system is an anti-inflammation system. as well as an inflammation system. It's both. It's both. But they give cortisone shots to football players in the locker room for a reason. It blocks pain and all these things.

But too much of it over extended period of time does what?

It can cause chronic inflammation. It can cause chronic fatigue. I mean, there is a debate out there. Most serious MDs don't believe in adrenal burnout. people think of adrenal burnout. There is something called adrenal fatigue or adrenal burnout. So there is something called adrenal insufficiency syndrome, which is a real medical phenomenon where the adrenals are incapable of making these cortisol and adrenal hormones. But the truth is that you have enough adrenaline and cortisol in your body to last two lifetimes and 25 famines. I mean, we were built with a lot of robustness, right? This explains that the David Goggins of the world. We all do have that greater capacity that people talk about. Stress is very misunderstood because people think of stress as this ancient carryover that's very unfortunate. It kind of gets lumped with depression like, oh, this is just a flaw in our design or something. But actually, stress is wonderful. It actually activates our immune system. So anytime you liberate adrenaline into your bloodstream, you also protect yourself against infection of bacteria and viruses because if you think about if we had to gather food and we didn't have it and we had to then pack up and migrate long distances, you can't afford to get sick. And this is why people who work, work, work, work, and then rest, they usually get sick when they finally stop and rest. Really? Yeah. It's like the post-finals phenomenon in university or after the season for a game or the caretaker thing where you're taking care of somebody who's ill and you're just work, work, work or taking care of young children and then you finally stop to rest, you go on vacation and you get slammed with, with anxiety.

Why is that?

Because you're being in your comfort zone now? Because the stress turned off. And adrenaline, so that these, the stress response recruits the immune organs of the body to release killer T-cells. In fact, Wim Hof breathing, I know you're familiar with Wim, of doing 20 or 30 deep inhales and exhales, and also combined with some breath hold type work, exhale, hold, inhale, hold, is known to stimulate adrenaline release. and one of the better papers that's out there, scientific peer-reviewed papers, is a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences where they brought in two groups. One group did Wim Hof breathing. The other group did just mindful meditation. Both groups were injected with E. Coli.

That's crazy.

Right? It's crazy. The meditators got fever, diarrhea, and vomiting. and the people who did Wim Hof either didn't get it or got it to a much lesser extent.

It's sluggish, but not.

They didn't.

Right. Isn't that crazy? This is not an experiment to do at home. Isn't this crazy? But it makes perfect sense because that breathing simulates a stress response. It stimulates cortisol and adrenaline, which signals to- that protects the body. Right, which signals to the thymus, the spleen, and the other, you know, the nodes of the immune system to liberate killer cells. And so when that bacteria comes in, the system is ready for it.

Your body is defending against viruses, that's right. disease, essentially.

That'S right.

When you create a routine of healthy stress.

That'S right. And we could talk about, we definitely want to, you don't want stress on all the time. Sleep is really important, et cetera. But that stress response combats infection because it recruits immune cells. Now, I wanna be really clear, 'cause there's been a lot of discussion about that study out there, most of which is totally wrong. I'm not Hoff's breathing study or the- the study was done correctly, but when people recap that study and summarize it, oftentimes they'll say it suppressed the immune response, that people were able to suppress the immune response, and that's absolutely wrong. what does that mean, suppress the immune response? well, exactly, it doesn't make any sense. What that did was, and if you look at the graphs in that paper, which I've done, what it did is it stimulated cortisol release. It stimulated adrenaline release or epinephrine release so that the system was primed to battle infection. And so I think it's a very impressive thing and, you know, hats off to Wim for discovering and thinking about a way to recruit the, what's called the innate immune system. Before that study, it was thought that you couldn't really recruit the immune system in that way. Now, you don't have to do that breathing. You could if you like, but you don't have to do that breathing to recruit the immune response. What else could you do? A cold shower or an ice bath is another way to induce stress. Which is what he does. Exactly, exactly. And so I think that, you know, when you look at states of stress, I mean, cold water is one way to do it. Intense, the breathing that they do, that sort of Wim Hof breathing is also classically called tumo breathing. It's kind of the opposite of the physiological side that I described, the double inhale, exhale. because it's not designed to reduce stress. It's actually designed to increase your level of alertness. And it's interesting because a lot of people find great relief from stress by doing this tumo type Wim Hof intense breathing once a day. Now, the reason I suggest physiological size is they can be done in real time. You can get into the elevator and do a physiological size. You could also do tumo type breathing. In any moment you can do a- Right, exactly. Whereas the more intense forms of breathing are more of a practice that you do.

-Yeah, it might take 10, 20 minutes.

-What they tend to do in what cold showers and ice baths and things like that do is they raise the ceiling on your stress threshold. And what I mean by that is throughout the day and throughout the year, we're confronted with different things. The mind plays an important role in interpreting whether or not it's overwhelming or tolerable. Intense breathing like tumo breathing or ice baths or cold showers or intense exercise like high intensity interval training type stuff teaches the mind to be comfortable in these higher stress states where in other words, it teaches people to be comfortable when they have a lot of adrenaline in their body. This is basically stress inoculation. But stress inoculation is not about not getting stressed. It's actually about divorcing the mind-body relationship a bit. so that you're calm in the mind when your body is very amplified. Yeah, so if you've ever done tumo type breathing or you've done a cold shower, the goal is to get the.

Adrenaline release and then calm your mind. And then calm your mind. And stay in the ice, not like, I'm freezing, but more like, no, I can handle this. That's right. And have power over your thoughts and your mind so that you can have more control of your body. Obviously, you're gonna feel cold.

Right.

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

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

The reason I call it a brain-body contract early on is that the brain and the body are constantly in dialogue. So, you know, the idea that when we're depressed we tend to be in more defensive type postures, when we're feeling good we tend to be in more 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 things that are important. First of all, just to go a little deeper on what thoughts are. Thoughts happen spontaneously all the time. They're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection. But thoughts can also be deliberately introduced. For instance, right now, I can say, okay, have a thought that just decide to write your name and you can do that. I'm going to decide to write my name and you can do it. So that's a deliberate thought which says that you can introduce thoughts. So I think it's very hard to control negative thoughts directly by trying to suppress them. Generally, they tend to just want to continue to geyser up all the time. But we can introduce a positive thought. Anyone that's making that effort even in a tiny way just to take this incredible machinery that we were given, this nervous system, and to leverage it toward being better, feeling better, and showing up better for other people. I really believe that's why we're here.

What would you say is the biggest lessons from marriage and divorce that have taught you about health and longevity?

That's a great question. I think everybody's different. And for me, the key to really finding happiness and the key to finding love that is a really good, healthy, solid love, which I have now, was really dealing with my original traumas and wounds.

Really?

Yeah.

And I think, you know, you wrote a book about toxic masculinity, and I think, you know, we all, whether we're men or women, throughout our childhood, have big or small traumas. You know, Gebhard Marti talks about micro trauma, macro trauma. You know, micro trauma could just not being seen by your parents and not being loved well enough or neglected or not actual abuse, whereas, you know, there's actual real emotional or physical. abuse or sexual abuse. So, all that registers in our nervous system. And for me, I had corrupted love software and I had to heal that.

Corrupted love software?

Yeah.

What did that mean for you?

Well, you know, I'll take the brief stories. You know, my mother was a child of deaf parents.

Deaf?

Deaf. They couldn't hear. So, she was her ears and her eyes.

Wow. That's a lot of responsibility.

So, she became a parent. to them.

Yeah.

She became somebody who thought that love was taking care of people who needed help or were broken. Wow, that's interesting.

Right?

So she picked my dad and my stepfather who were very broken and they were in very, you know, damaged emotionally. And that was because, you know, that's what she knew.

That was her familiarity.

Familiarity. And my, you know, my dad was broken because his mother, you know, was a child of 13 and accidentally killed her sister when she was to pushing her off to swing. And it was the pry of the family. Had to sit at a different table, was completely neurotic and anxious. And that epigenome goes in through. It's translated through generations. And so it, you know, it all makes sense. And so then I. I. My mom was super depressed and unhappy, and she used me to be her therapist.

Oh, man.

As a little kid, which is bad.

You repeated the pattern.

Like, and I thought, oh, love is taking care of someone who's needy and broken.

Right.

So... Who needs me?

Oh, yeah. So I would had the savior complex and I would try to fill this hole that I had. This emptiness that I had because I thought that, you know, if I did that I could kind of fill this emptiness that I have picking these people in a way that filled me up because I was, you know, serving them or taking care of them or... And it wasn't always exactly like that, but it was... I kept learning about this pattern And until I really healed that, I wasn't able to just be ready for love. So you kind of have to not find the right person. You have to be the right person. So true. What allowed you to heal it?

What allowed you to recognize it and then start the healing journey? Yeah, which is a journey.

Yeah, I know. I've been doing it. I intellectually understood it, but it's physical. Yeah, but I really went through a process of using psychedelics to heal a lot of the trauma. which is now emerging as a really valid way to start to re-pattern your neurology that literally changes the structure and function of your neurons in your brain, these compounds. And I began to sort of do some inquiry. I decided to take a break from relationships and really do a deep in-dive, looking at my own mind, my own thoughts, my own beliefs, every day writing them down, kind of rewriting the story from my higher self. And then I unpacked my whole life with a friend of mine who's a coach, a really amazing woman, Lauren Zander. And I was able to see my whole childhood very differently and talk about incest that happened to me and things that I just hadn't buried for 50 years. And then I saw this movie, CODA, which was a Best Picture Academy Award winning film last year about Children of Deaf Adults. CODA means Children of Deaf Adults. And it was my mother's story. Not actually her story, but it was the same.

She was a child of here of deaf parents. Because the child in the, I still.

Haven'T seen yet, but the child has got a deaf family, right? Yeah. She's hearing and it's about her struggle to become in, you know, like disentangled from the dependency her parents had on her.

Holy cow. So what opened up for you?

So that was like, that just, like, hit me like a. Like a lightning bolt. And I just was sobbing and sobbing.

I.

It took me hours and hours to watch the movie because I had to stop because I was just being, like, on the floor just in this cathartic process. And I never really happened to me like that before.

And.

And after that happened, I kind of got what happened to my mother. I got what happened to me. I got, you know, what was going off in my own nervous system, and then I just felt free. and, like, I felt light, and I healed a lot of that. So it took me a while. I'm a slow learner. I'm good with medicine, but it's okay.

We all have our things.

It took me a minute.

And.

But I now I just feel like I have such a different wiring and a different nervous system, and it's. I feel way calmer and way less anxious in relationship.

And how.

I mean, where would you be had you not talked to that, you know, therapist friend and kind of. look back at your entire history of your life and assess that. If you didn't watch that movie, if you didn't do the psychedelics, kind of all those medicines in one, where would you be had you skipped it after your last relationship?

You know, I always made a joke. I said, I had a broken picker. You know, I still have a broken picker. I still might try to find someone who isn't really the person that's going to be able to meet me that's an equal in have a healthy attachment style. It can be independent but come together. And just like it really was powerful.

That's incredible. This all happened in the last couple of years. There's hope after 60, even if you keep choosing poorly.

Totally, totally.

That's incredible.

Yeah, and it just got me free. And I think a lot of these cultures don't have to deal with this stuff. I mean, of course there's always family drama and this and that, but I think there's such a level of connection and community and mutual support and happiness and joy as part of living that we've sort of lost. And I think that was a big learning for me.

And how did you feel beforehand? Like in the previous 40 years of different marriages and relationships, did you say you feel free and lighter? Did you never feel free in marriage or in relationship?

No, I didn't. I always felt trapped.

What was the feeling?

I didn't know until afterwards. You don't know how much force is standing on your foot until it gets off. It was kind of like that. Like, wow, I was always so anxious and kind of trying to hold on to love and keep love and be afraid of losing love and want someone to love me. And it just was like such a weird dynamic that I was embedded in that I didn't even fully see. Yeah.

And this is I'm so excited you're sharing this.

This is powerful.

Yeah.

I think a lot of people need to see this and hear this from you, Mark, because they see you as this, I don't know, what are you? 30, 30 time New York Times bestselling author, you know, this. this individual who's done so well and been so successful in many areas of life. And I'm not saying that, you know, the marriages and the relationship we're in were all like failures. I'm sure you had great love and connection and moments and things like that, but they weren't, you know, it sounds like the right fit and you didn't feel like you were free inside.

Right.

And maybe they didn't feel the same thing either. So I'm not saying they were bad and wrong or something. But to hear you talk about this, this healing journey at this stage, as someone who studies healing and as someone who studies medicine and that studies all these things, even you had to learn how to heal relationships. You knew about the body stuff and food and medicine, but it was the healing, the relationship and the childhood wound that you carried with you all those years.

And what's interesting now, Louis, is in our culture, we're starting to have a language for this and the acceptance of this and you know, the sort of not seeing mental illness as a stigma, but as a consequence of a lot of cultural and personal trauma. I mean, just living in our culture today is traumatic. You just open the newspaper, listen to the news, or the amount of conflict and strife and just economic inequities and all the things that we're dealing with, climate change. I mean, it's a very psychologically stressful moment of history.

But.

We also can shift the relationship to that by understanding how our brains work and our nervous systems work and start to actually not necessarily get caught up in all that and kind of re-reset our...

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Systems. So one of the key things I talked about in the book is mindset. It's how our minds really play a role in our longevity. And if we don't get that straight, we're screwed. When people kill themselves by their thoughts, right? Literally.

Give me some examples. What do you mean how do they kill themselves?

I mean, they have suicidal thoughts.

They'll lead themselves to killing themselves.

I mean, it's all about belief, right? So, when you look at voodoo, for example, I mean, you put a voodoo hex on somebody, boom, they can drop dead. One of my mentors who very much inspired me in performing medicine was Bernie Siegel, who I love Medicine and Miracles, who's this kind of Yale oncologist. bald guy so cute, writes with a purple pen, letters he used to write me, and back before email. And he talked about these studies where they would tell this cancer patient that they found this great new cure and they gave them this pill that was a placebo and their tumors shrunk overnight. And then they told them a month later, two months later, oh, they found it didn't work so well and the tumors came flying back. So that's the power of the pharmacy in our minds.

This is fascinating. I'm still kind of amazed that this all happened in the last couple of years. So after the movie, you had this catharsis experience, right? And you felt lighter after that.

Yeah.

I felt free.

Right after this on the floor sobbing moment.

Yeah, I can only explain it, but I just felt like I was flying. Like I just felt like I'd been carrying this weight my whole life. It just was gone.

Do you feel like it was completely, do you feel like your body has, your nervous system was fully healed after that? Or has there been moments of like triggers and kind of the PTSD the feelings in your nervous system or like-.

I think it's echoes and shadows more that come back now. Like that I can recognize and go, oh, all right, whatever. It's not like it grabs me like it used to.

Wow. This is fascinating. This all happened in the last couple of years.

Yeah, pretty cool. And then I began to think about just aging and longevity in general and how do we build a life that creates healing in our body, whether it's healing or trauma. And I have a whole section in the book about healing trauma because that's a key part.

It's huge.

And some of the things that are now available like ketamine and still like ganglion blocks and increasingly probably by 2024 MDMA will be available legally for psychedelic assisted therapy and maybe psilocybin I think was legalized in Colorado now and in Oregon. So it's all coming. And I think there's so many different modalities for people to choose from that we never had for?

Sure.

How important is expressing your emotions, crying, laughing, and living longer and healthier?

Well, I do a lot of laughing. I do some crying. And I think my current relationship, I'm the crier. Like if we're watching a movie or show, you know, like whatever, where we're listening to a speech at a wedding, I'm the one crying.

It's so funny because yesterday I was on a flight and I watched Coco. The movie Coco. I'm literally, there's a little guy next to me. And I'm literally, I kid you not, I cried four times watching Coco. The music and the storytelling. I'm like, this is a cartoon.

And I'm crying.

But it was so beautiful. I was telling Martha about it and she was like, yeah, it's such a beautiful, 'cause it's all about family. It's all about connection. It's all about like sharing your music with the world and this, you know, beautiful story. So you feel like you're the crier in the relationship. That's right. But how powerful is crying as an emotion and laughing.

I think it's being able to be free and expressed, whatever it is. Being able to not have to shut down and shut off and to learn how to do it in a way that's not destructive, right? To do it in a way that's loving and kind and thoughtful. There's always a way of getting expressed without hurting somebody else.

Yes.

So I think we tend in our culture to lash out and to be reactive, and that's not good.

That's not good.

So it's like, it's sort of It's like Victor Frankl's idea of slowing things down, like in between stimulus and response, there's a gap or a pause, right? And then that pause lies the choice. So you can choose to slow down the whole process. And I'm friends with Tom Brady and he's like, you know, when I snap the ball, everything's in slow motion. Like everything just slows down. It's like... It's amazing. And you think it all happens like in seconds, but like he's like all the time in the world, right? Because everything just goes in slow motion because he's so present. so we can do that in every moment. It just takes practice. It's a skill. If you want to lift 50 pounds, well, you have to work at it. If you want to train your mind to work differently, you have to work at it. You have to investigate your mind. That's what all these practices are. Ancient. We in our culture are really good with outer technology, but places like Tibet, they were really experimenting with inner technology for thousands of years and learned all sorts of skills about mastering the mind. Mastering your body is key, but mastering your mind is also a key to longevity.

And so it's like mastering your emotions and your heart is a key as well.

Yeah, but your mind is what regulates your emotions. Now, people have argued with me about this, but what happens first is your thought and then the feeling, right? And then the emotion, right? Because you have, even if it's an instantaneous thing, there's some thought that precedes it, even if it's a subconscious thought that precedes the feeling or emotion.

So you never have the feeling first. unless you don't have the ability to think, but then you probably want to be here.

So it's like, some people don't have that, but yeah.

So it's always a thought.

Yeah.

Or it's a, so it can't be a feeling, huh? Because you have to think it first before you feel it.

Yes, I think so. I think always, whether it's, it's, it's.

Like, it's like if you smelled something that brings back a memory.

Right.

Is that a thought or if you, yeah.

Or if you, you know, you see you're about to get in a car crash, you have the thought, I'm gonna die, and then your body goes into reaction. And it can happen in a millisecond, but like you can have a millisecond thought, but it's always gonna precede whatever it is.

Sure, sure. So I'm curious about the relationship stuff, because I think you don't talk about this a lot.

I do a little bit. We can do it.

And I think I'm starting to believe more and more that the relationship you have with yourself is massive. The way you view yourself, your beliefs, you're talking about this now, how you think about yourself, how you feel about yourself, is key towards living a healthy life now, but also extending your life.

Totally.

And the way you view and think about your intimate relationship, I used to feel like I was trapped all the time. You know, I was fearful and I felt like I was trapped and there was no way out. I couldn't be myself.

Yeah.

And that would make me feel unhealthy.

Inside.

It made me feel like I was a six out of a 10 every day. Yeah. Because I felt, like, trapped. Right. No, I'm doing that to myself. No one is. No one is trapping me. It's my fear and insecurity of, like, leaving the relationship or whatever it might be, or having the courage to communicate all these things that I needed to learn. And so the relationship we have with ourselves and with our intimate partner, I'm starting to learn, is the most powerful. One of the most powerful things for longevity. why do you think it's so hard for us to change and improve our life when things are good or a little less than good?

Well, I think that we delude ourselves into thinking when things are good, we delude ourselves into thinking they're always going to be good. And we also delude ourselves into believing that our lives are static in that regard. And the truth is, is that everything is always in flux. That flux may be imperceptible in the moment, But in truth, and I say this all the time, every thought that you entertain, every word that comes out of your mouth, every interaction that you have with another human being, every reaction that you have to whatever stimulus is coming your way, is either moving you forward in your life towards your aspirations or some level of self-actualization, or you're regressing back to some former less evolved version of yourself. And the more you can kind of be present with that and appreciate that truth, then you realize that as good as your life may be, there's always growth to be had. And all of us, no matter who you are, have blind spots. You may think you're doing great in all these areas, but you need people in your life who are giving you feedback saying, yeah, I know you think that you're rocking it out over here, but you're kind of off base on this other like, I think we all need, you know, a council of elders or a board of advisors who are willing to be honest with us to say, look, you're not seeing this over here, you need to redirect. And then you're able to make those adjustments without having to reap the consequences of some crisis. Because you're kind of, you know, jagging, jigging and jagging, you know, along the way. and course correcting as you go, as opposed to hitting a wall and then going, Holy, like I thought I was good. And now, only now do I realize that, you know, I've been doing all these things all along that led to this point. We're our own worst enemies when it comes to objectively assessing where we're at.

Ourselves. Yeah. We're horrible at it. We should be asking our friends and family and peers all the time, Hey, where do you think I can improve? What am I doing really well that I could do better at? What are the things I'm not doing well that I should be doing better at? But a lot of us don't want.

To ask those questions. We don't want the truth. Who is it? Richard Feynman, I think it was. It said something like, our job is to be something like, I'm going to completely butcher this, but it's something like our job is to be honest with ourselves, but we're the ones that are most easily deluded by ourselves. You know what I mean? That's why you need those outside sources to provide you with that feedback. And that's why when you look at somebody we've both interviewed that were friends with Jesse Itzler, that's why I have so much respect for somebody like that whose life was going really well and he's like, it's too good. I need to bring David Goggins into my life to mix things up. I need to go to this monastery and sit with these monks for a while because he realized that his life was was just cruising along and that unless he created interruptions for himself, that he would just live that way in ease and comfort, you know, for as long as the universe would allow him.

Very few people do that.

Right.

I mean, it takes an extraordinary person to do that.

When you're making all the money in the world, when everything you touch turns to gold, when you've got the family, the kids, the relationship, it's like, I've got good friends. It's hard to say, I'm going to push myself harder. I'm going to step up and try to transform myself even more. Because some people might say, why work that hard to do that for yourself? Just enjoy your life, relax. Like you don't need to do all these crazy things to transform.

But the truth is, and anybody who's done hard things in their life knows this, that you feel most alive when you have the courage to step outside of your comfort zone and test yourself and put yourself in an uncomfortable situation where you're going to have to rise to the occasion. Those heightened moments are when you feel most fulfilled, most purposeful, and most, you know, kind of connected to yourself. And I think Jesse understood that as somebody who had, you know, done ultra marathons before. He knew how he felt when he was, you know, endeavoring to do something that perhaps he thought not possible. and I think, you know, when you live this, all our culture, our culture is set up with this programming that we're all meant to aspire to that level of ease and comfort and luxury. But what's missing is the fact that what actually provides the sense of satisfaction and fulfillment is getting outside of that and testing yourself. And I think for a lot of people, they don't understand that until they get a taste of what Jesse experienced, which is, Look, I got all this stuff, but I'm not content or as fulfilled as I would like to be, and I need to step outside of that in order to reconnect with that thing that fundamentally is part of being a human.

Yeah, and I think you could have all the outer fulfillment in the world, but you're still lying to yourself until you create inner fulfillment. And that usually comes through mastery of some type of practice or overcoming something challenging on a consistent basis where you say, okay, I'm building confidence because I did something as hard. It was hard for me to learn, hard for me to overcome. And I think the more things we learn how to overcome on a consistent basis, the happier we become.

Yeah, to be sure. I mean, and it, you know, to kind of underscore your point, it's not about external validation. It's about your relationship to yourself.

Yes.

And you know when your head hits the pillow at night and when you wake up in the morning what that relationship looks like. And if that's missing something and perhaps that's a little nudge or a call to action that you need to change things up a little bit.

So, when did this moment, was this about 20 years ago when you started to transform your food, your nutrition training?

14 years ago.

14 years ago. How does someone, because a lot of people go through these especially this year, losing a job, a breakup, a relationship, a health scare, whatever it may be, losing a friend or a parent is happening a lot right now, unfortunately, for people. And then people decide to take action and say, okay, I'm gonna change my life and I'm gonna take action, I'm gonna commit to this and have these new goals, I'm gonna go after it. I'm gonna let go of sugar and be vegan, whatever it is. How does someone sustain it for 14 years? and beyond because sometimes they'll do that for two years and then fall back into the old patterns. How do we stay consistent in growing the way you did? Because you used to drink a lot of alcohol, used to eat horrible, not train, all these things, and you've been consistent 14 years.

Yeah, I think the key is that as important as it is to set big goals that scare you and hold this lofty aspiration for a better version of who you are. Those are like North Stars to help guide your direction. But once you kind of set those, at least what I've done is I just lodge them in the back of my mind. And then it's really just about what's happening in the moment. Again, it goes back to the present. When I got sober, the idea that I was never going to drink alcohol again, are you kidding me? Like, I have to go to a bachelor party in six months and then got this thing in Vegas and then I have to go to, it's like, how am I going to get through those things without drinking? It's completely overwhelming. And I think when people set a goal, they start future tripping on that kind of stuff and then it seems overwhelming and ultimately that leads to abandoning it. So what you have to do is you have to chunk it. You have to break it down into bite-sized chunks and say, I know I'm going to that bachelor party in six months, but I just today, I just have to not drink. That's all I have to worry about. Or today, I just need to make sure that I don't end up face planting in Haagen-Dazs before I go to bed. That's the only thing that's your job.

This is your job.

Yeah, it's like, what are you doing right now? What's the next right choice that you're making? And when you break it down into its smallest components, then it becomes digestible. So it's about putting distance between yourself and whatever that imagined future might be because it hasn't happened yet and shouldn't take up any mental energy and just focusing on what you're doing right now. We were talking about back to the marathon before the podcast, we were talking about how you want to do this marathon and it's how overwhelming because it's longer than you've ever run before and I'm like, just worry, you can do it. It's just about One day at a time.

Preparation, one day at a time.

Today I'm running eight miles. that's all I got to worry about. You know what I mean? And I think when you begin to master these small tasks and you're just eating away very, very gradually at these goals, you know, over time, they become. They become less intimidating and much more doable. And I think along the way, as you master these tasks, they become rote. So then they don't expend a lot of mental energy. You're like, oh, this is just what I do. so your actions start to align with a value system. And I think when your actions align with your values, then it's less about achieving a goal and more about just acclimating your lifestyle around these various actions and principles. They just become who you are. And the goal is achieved not because you're working hard towards it, but because it just becomes the person that you are.

It's part of your identity. I am this thing. I am a sober individual.

I am a sober individual. I am somebody who runs. I'm somebody who doesn't eat animal products. I'm somebody who doesn't drink.

Yeah.

There's no exceptions. You just are that.

Right.

I think a lot of people don't decide to create new identities. Is it important that we should be thinking of a new identity all the time or just getting clear on the values we want to live by and then become that identity?

Yeah.

The latter. think about like, oh, these are my, you know, these, I don't think about, I'm trying to become this other person. I just spend time thinking about what's important to me and how can I align my actions with that set of principles, right? That's all that it requires. And I think in furtherance of that point, people tend to wildly overestimate what they can achieve in a year. and wildly underestimate what they can achieve in a decade. I'm much older than you. I'm 54. I've been trying to iterate on myself for many, many years. And if you Google me, there's a narrative that makes it look like I snap my fingers and all these things happened overnight. But in truth, my personal growth trajectory started when I was 31 and I found myself in a treatment center as a hopeless alcoholic. And then it was another 10 years before I figured out I had all these blind spots around other habits that were leading me astray and how to address those. And it's just been one step at a time of moving forward. I mean, I remember as I was driving over here, I have this vivid memory of coming to your apartment the first time I met you and I was going to be on your podcast and you were going to be on mine.

It's like, what, a few years ago, maybe?

You had like, no, it had to be like seven years ago.

Seven years ago.

'Cause we started right around the same time.

Yeah, you started a few months before me.

Yeah. Seven years ago, yeah.

No furniture in your apartment.

I had nothing. And you had this Mike, and I was like, you need a better Mike. And like, we both were trying to.

Figure out this podcast thing. Yeah. How do we get people to figure.

Out what the download button is? And, yeah. And if I was to tell you then, you were gonna have these millions of people that care deeply what you do and that you were going to be in this beautiful studio doing this thing. Like you would have been like, there's no way. And how did you achieve that? Just like you just another episode, like one more guess, like who am I interviewing today? You know, you just stay in the process. The more that you can divorce your emotional attachment to outcomes and future, you know, destinations and just concentrate on doing the best job with what you've got right in front of you and fall in love with the process. And that process being an expression of that value system and what you care about, that's where you're in a position to actually succeed. And then you wake up 10 years later and you're like, holy. I'm in this fancy Studio.

How did that happen? Right. And the outcomes don't matter as much anymore. You have the goal, but you're so you're enjoying the process so much.

It's not about that.

The little wins are so exciting, you just love your life. And when you love your life and you're happier and you're more appreciative and grateful, you're going to start attracting more of those good things in your life.

Right, right. The opportunities come to you.

They start chasing you, you don't chase them.

Exactly, because suddenly you're carrying a residence that's attractive and people want to be around that. and so you're acting more like a tractor beam rather than running around, expending your energy, trying to get people interested in what you're doing because you're focused on doing something exceptional that's an authentic expression of who you are and ultimately that becomes attractive to the world around you.

Yeah. You mentioned in the last time we had you on that one of the biggest challenges you have is you have too many opportunities now and you're recovering people pleaser and you say yes to a lot of things that then pull you away from your current projects and mission that you have. How have you been in the last year and a half since then?

I mean, I still struggle with that. You know, I'm still a hopeless people pleaser. Do you like me, Louis?

Yeah, yeah.

Was this okay? Yeah.

Right. You know, it's funny, when the pandemic started, I thought, I'm also like naturally introverted, so I thought, this will be awesome.

Like, I can see my world.

I have an excuse to, like, not, you know, follow through on any of these. All these commitments that I made to other people to get involved in their stuff because I can't travel and I can't do it. So now I can just do my thing, you know, and. And I don't have to, you know, say yes to anything. I can say no to a bunch of stuff. Over time, I figured out that I was much more of a social creature than I suspected, because, like everybody, I need that human connection. as well. I would say that I've gotten a lot better, but out of necessity, just because when you're focused on your thing, there just isn't as much room as you would like to get involved in other people's stuff. But it's still difficult for me. Somebody will call me and be like, I'm doing this thing. And my instinct is always like, yeah, let me help you. I want to do this. I want to do that. And it becomes hard. So you have to be It's back to your values. What is your core? I hate the word mission, but what is it that you're actually doing? What's a distraction and what's a value add? And sometimes it's easy to distinguish those things, but sometimes it's not.

Would you say you have a very addictive personality?

Yeah, I'm recovering. I spent 100 days in a treatment center for addiction. so, yes, I'm a highly, highly addictive personality.

How does someone use their addictive personality in their favor for good? Because you've changed it to be more in your favor for good, but still have, you know, this. I know it's not consuming you, but it's like this people-pleasing mentality, same as me, which is kind of addictive thing to.

Yeah.

Then want to break. How do people break? that for all the bad things in their life and use it for all good things?

Well, first, let me say on the subject of addiction, like I'm a recovering alcoholic. I've been in recovery for a very long time. 12 Steps saved my life. The most important thing to me is staying sober, helping another alcoholic achieve sobriety. That being said, I think addiction lives on a spectrum. Like I'm perhaps at one more extreme end of that. But for every junkie that can't pull the needle out of their arm, there's millions of people that can't put the phone down or find themselves repeatedly in unhealthy relationships or unable to stay out of the casino or whatever it is. maybe they just can't stop eating chocolate. I think we all have a variety of addictive tendencies, no matter who you are, even if you're grounded and healthy. That being said, figuring out how to, first of all, figuring out how to quell the negative impacts of that is important. And I've learned many tools over the years from surrender to service and and at the same time, being gentle with yourself and saying, okay, this is my disposition. Like, I can't always be fighting it, but how can I channel it into something productive for myself? So whether, you know, I'm working on a book or I'm building my podcast or whatever other creative Pursuit it is, I've been successful. because I know how to like focus on something and blot out the world and like go all in on it. Perhaps that is at times unhealthy, but I think it's okay as long as you acknowledge that and understand that that pendulum has to swing back to center, right? Like if you look at the buckets of your life, like what's most important? Like I have, I have my recovery, I have my family, I have my career, I have my friends. whatever those buckets may be in your life, I think it's okay to be really focused on one at a time. The idea that you're going to give all those buckets the equal amount of attention on a daily basis is unrealistic.

It's really hard. Yeah.

Which is why I have strong opinions about this idea of balance. But you have to make sure that you don't become so immersed or obsessive or compulsive about this one thing that you can pull yourself out of it and have the conscious awareness to say, okay, it's time for me to now reinvest that energy in one of these other buckets. Or how can I apportion my energy and my time so that I'm making sure that the things that are important in my life are being tended to and attended to.

What's the biggest addiction that's holding you back? Still, biggest challenge.

People pleasing is a big one. Perfectionism is a big one. I end up being a bottleneck in a lot of stuff. This is a conversation we've had a million times. I got to like day one, I still fight this battle. I'm better though. It's good.

What do you think it is? Why do you think people live in perfectionism? Why is that a thing for so many people?

It's a control mechanism. And I think it's also about external validation. like this has to be perfect or I won't be loved. Or if this isn't perfect, then people are gonna think differently of me than I want them to think. So I think a lot of it is based on trying to control external perceptions of you and that's rooted in self-esteem, right? If your self-esteem is fragile, then you're gonna wanna make sure that every step that you make is absolutely perfect so you're not giving anyone an excuse to not accept you.

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

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