"Your Behaviour Will RESET 100% After Watching This" | Lewis Howes

It's not about finishing anything. It's not about finishing anything. The only metric of success from now on for you should be one thing.

You mentioned you shouldn't think about the smart goals. What should we be thinking about on how to set our goals and dreams for our life?

Yeah, so goals are tricky. I would say that there's nothing inherently wrong with the smart goals, technique, et cetera. There is definitely a lot wrong with the visioning of, oh, this is what I. Let me sit here and make a vision board and a mood board about my five year plan. My best piece of advice is let's just start with tomorrow. Okay, let's just start with tomorrow as opposed to, oh, what do I want to do in five years and my vision board and my mood board and all that stuff. How would the person you want to become? Again, it's about living according to your values and nobody can tell you what your values are. How would the person you want to become spend their time and by blocking out that time to say, you know what? Yes, I have a dream that someday I'll write a novel. I have a dream that I'll get my PhD. I'll get a dream. A dream that I'll have a successful business. Okay, but how much time are you going to invest in that? And knowing that constraint of the same 24 hours with everything else that you want to do and that you dream of forces you to prioritize. And that is essential. You know, consistency over intensity, that is essential to getting to that long term goal, is to work on it day or over, day after day after day, relentless forward momentum. This is how we accomplish these big goals, not just dreams about them. The only metric of success from now on for you should be one thing. Did I do what I said I would do without distraction? That's it. That's all you got to do. It's not about finishing anything. It's not about finishing anything. Because when you say to yourself in your calendar, I am going to sit at my desk and work on my book, as you said, Louis. Right, for 30 minutes, 45 minutes. Whatever it is you say you want to do, I don't care how long you work on it, whatever you said you're going to do, that technique has been shown. This is called making an implementation intention, which is just a fancy way psychologists call planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. That technique has been shown to be more effective. Here's the kicker. The people who do that actually finish more they actually get more done than the people who use the to do list technique.

It's kind of like saying, okay, I'm not going to go run for an hour today, but I'm gonna put my shoes on and I'm gonna go outside and I'm gonna start the run for two minutes. And I'm just gonna do that every day. But by saying, okay, I'm gonna schedule this for 10 minutes or whatever, then you typically want to do more because you're already in the flow.

Right? It's a little bit more than tiny steps. It's actually saying for that period of time. So I respect that, you know, just get started technique. Very nice. But it's the don't stop technique.

Got it. More than just get started, don't get discarded. Go for 30 minutes, go for the time you scheduled in your calendar, right?

Don't say, oh, I'm gonna run a 7:30 or whatever. Say I am going to walk for 30 minutes and I'm not gonna do anything else that might take me away from working on this thing for 30 minutes in my life. Okay? I'm gonna be with my child without distraction for one hour. That's all I'm going to do. I am going to check email and do nothing but flush through my email inbox for 15 minutes without doing anything else. I am going to read a book and nothing else for 20 minutes. That is all you need to do to measure yourself. Don't worry about will I finish the book? Will I get to inbox zero? Will I have a beautiful relationship with my child? Will I ever be in good physical fitness? Don't worry about the end goals. Worry about did you put in the time to work on the task you wanted to work on without distraction? That's your only metric of success.

And what happens to our self confidence or the belief in ourself when we constantly let ourselves down with this process of not doing what we say we want to do? Right?

So if you use the if you run your life on a to do list and you don't finish what you said you're going to do, which barely anybody with a to do list actually, you know who runs a life with a to do list actually does, you're reinforcing a negative self image of another day went by and here I go. I didn't do what I said I was going to do. Look, I still got all these things that I didn't get to what a loser. As opposed to when you measure yourself based on this only metric of did I Do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would. Without distraction. You are a winner with every time.

Box being just being your word. Yeah. It doesn't matter the results you get. It's just that I was my word today. I was my word. And what I said I was gonna do, I did it. And that builds a better self image and self confidence with self. Right?

Bingo. So being indistractable first and foremost is about personal integrity. It's about being as honest with yourself as you are with other people. Right. We all know that. We wouldn't want to be a liar. Being called a liar is one of the worst insults anybody could say to you. Right. You wouldn't want to lie to your friends, to your family, to your co workers. And yet we lie to ourselves every day. Right? Oh, I'm definitely going to go work out. No, you didn't. I'm definitely going to eat right? Nah, I'm definitely going to be fully present with the people I love. Not really. We lie to ourselves and that takes a huge psychic toll on our self image and we don't even realize it until it's too late. And that's when people start concocting all these ridiculous ideas. Oh, I have a short attention span or I'm bad with time management or hey, you know what, I probably need some kind of diagnosis. And it's all ridiculous. For the vast majority of people, there's nothing wrong with them. Right. They just reinforce this crappy self image of someone who's incapable when they are perfectly capable if they had the right techniques.

How much does self confidence or believing in yourself matter in terms of accomplishing the goals we set out for ourselves? Is it if we have a low self esteem and low self confidence, do you believe that we can still accomplish the goals and dreams that we have? Or do we really need to start building confidence and belief in our actions and in who we are with those actions in order to accomplish those goals?

Yeah. So this is where the psychology of agency comes into play. That believing that you can do something is incredibly empowering. The question, of course, is, well, how do I get that belief? And where most people go wrong is that they have these big hairy goals. Right. We've all heard about, oh, you have to have a specific, measurable, actionable, you know, the smart goals and all that stuff. And it turns out that the literature around this is another one of these areas that we've seen. The pop psychology is so off base. One of the most popular things that you hear These days around goals is that you have to have visioning. Let's all sit down and make a five year plan and a visioning board so that we can envision what we want. And it turns out that studies show that people who do this are shooting themselves in the foot.

Wow.

That we know that studies find that thinking to yourself, oh, you know, I want that beach body is pretty much the worst thing you can do. If you really do want that beach.

Body, really, what should you do instead?

Here's the difference. There's a good visioning and bad visioning. Bad visioning is envision your, you know, this bull, excuse me, that comes from this idea of the secret, right, the law of attraction that, you know, envision yourself wealthy, envision yourself being in love, envisioning yourself being in good physical shape. Terrible. Don't do that. The good kind of visioning is not visioning the outcome. Because what's happening when you envision the outcome is that you are satiating that desire. By imagining it, you are satiating it. It feels like you already got it. Instead, the good kind of visioning is to envision what you will do when something gets in the way of the actions you have to take to get that goal.

So instead, when you're distracted, what are you gonna do?

What are you going to do? Exactly. So instead of thinking, oh my God, I'm going to look so good with a six pack, instead think about what am I going to do next time I go with my friends and they offer me a piece of chocolate cake? That's the right kind of vision.

Because envisioning this incredible result in a year or 10 years is nice in theory, but it's going to be extremely hard to get there with a big goal that you might have a big dream launching, anything, a book, the physical body, the relationship, it's not just going to happen instantly, without effort and work. So what I'm hearing you say is to focus on that's going to take a lot of work, time, energy. So every time I'm pulled away from that, envisioning how you're actually going to show up for yourself, to support yourself in getting there.

That's right, that's right. And so that's why reimagining these internal triggers is so important. As we talked about earlier, what is the dialogue? What techniques will I have? What arrows will I have in my quiver ready to go when I am tempted with procrastination and distraction? What will I do in those times?

Is there good research on what did you call this Revisioning or what do you call this?

Yeah, yeah, there is. There's actually some. There's an article on my blog. I can give you a link in the show Notes where I talk about the difference between good visioning and bad visioning. Very, very important. Because if there's one mantra I live by and is kind of the foundation of my life now since writing this book, and I didn't used to be this way, by the way. I, you know, I'm 42 years old. I used to be clinically obese. Really, today, I'm in the best shape of my life. I actually have a six pack for the first time ever. And I'm not saying this to brag. I'm saying this because what I've learned is that consistency is more important than intensity. Right? Consistency over intensity. In every area of your life, you want good relationships. You have to be consistently present with the people you love. You want to be great at your job. You have to consistently do the hard work that other people don't want to do. You want to have a, you know, be in good physical shape. You have to consistently show up and do the workouts. It's not about the intensity. It's not about, oh, it's New Year's, I'm going to make a resolution for five days and then quit. It's about consistent action. And that only comes not. Here's a really important point. It's not about knowing what to do. You know, we become so obsessed with, oh, what's the right workout? What's the right diet, what's the right way? This, that, you know, I better go get a book to tell me what to do. Like, let me go listen to some guru to give me all the answers. We basically all know what to do, right? And if you don't know what to do, Google it, for God's sakes. All the answers are right there, right? We basically know what to do. What we don't know how to do is how do we stop getting in our own way? The real problem is not that we don't know what to do. It's that we don't know how to stop getting distracted.

So how do we get out of our own way?

Yeah, so we went through one and a half of the strategies. Number one is mastering the internal triggers. Number two is making time for traction, which we talked about a little bit in terms of why making a schedule is so very important. It turns out the vast majority of people don't keep any sort of a calendar. Two thirds of people don't keep a calendar. Even those who do keep a calendar typically don't do it properly. And the proper way to do it is by using what's called a time box calendar. And I show you how to do that. This technique has been around for ages, it's been around for decades. It's actually one of the most studied techniques out there. Very, very well researched technique of planning your day. It's called making implementation intention. But we can go beyond that too, where what I advise in the book, and this hasn't been published elsewhere, is this process of what I call schedule syncing, which is very, very important. So making. So making time for traction is all about deciding how you want to spend your time, right? But to do that, well, the question is, well, how do I do that? How do I decide how I'm going to spend my time? And this is where a lot of people get stuck with the time boxing technique. You know, we've all heard it, but this is why people don't do it. They don't understand. What is the first step? How do I really get started in timeboxing? The first step is to start with our values, okay? Turning our values into time. So what are values? Values are attributes of the person you want to become. Let me say that again. What are values? Values are attributes of the person you want to become. So what we're going to do is we're going to ask ourselves, how would the person I want to become spend their time? And we're going to ask ourselves this in three life domains. These three life domains of you. You're at the center of these three life domains. Then your relationships, then your work. Most people do it in the wrong order, right? They start with their work and only then they give them whatever scraps of time are remaining to their friends, their family, and to themselves. No, we want to start with you. So we ask ourselves, how would the person I want to become spend their time investing in themselves? Now, if it is not up to me or anyone else to impose their values onto you, you have to ask this of yourself. How would the person I want to become spend their time investing in themselves? So how much time would they invest in physical fitness? If that's important to you, I'm not saying it should be, but if it's important to you, is that time to go to the gym, to go on a run, to go on a walk, whatever it might be. Proper nutrition, rest. Oh my God. How many of us know we have to get quality sleep? Everybody knows this. I don't need to tell you that you've read tons of literature that says sleep is important. How many of us have a bedtime?

Right.

How many of us actually have our calendar.

Yeah. Scheduled. Yes.

Very few people do. Right. We have to have that time scheduled because you know what you're going to do if you don't? You know, check Facebook for another five.

Days or watch another thing on Netflix.

Right.

You've got to have that time scheduled. Now again, if you say, you know, the way I invest in myself is I play video games for four hours a day, I got no problem with that. I'm not one of these chicken little tech critics that's going to say, oh, no, you know, watching football is okay, but playing video games is bad. No, ridiculous. Anything you want to do with your time is fine as long as you decide in advance. So if you say, I want time to play video games, great. But put it on your schedule. Don't do it according to the tech company's schedule. Do it according to your values and your schedule. So that's the you domain. Next comes the relationship domain. And this is a really important one. Part of the reason we have a loneliness epidemic in this country. And, you know, we know that researchers tell us that loneliness is as detrimental to our health as smoking and obesity.

Wow.

It is a real crisis right now. The reason this is happening, this is not happening because of social media. Social media is the symptom to this disease, which is that the proportion of time spent in planned social engagements in this country has been in a precipitous decline. Okay? So if you read Robert Putnam, back in the 1990s, he wrote this book called Bowling Alone, Right. Way back before Facebook and social media. And he documented this trend, this 50 year trend now, people spending less time in scheduled engagements with their friends. So he called it Bowling Alone because bowling used to be a big social activity. You'd go to the bowling league and you'd see your friends and you'd get together every Thursday night with your buddies. And that doesn't happen like it used to. Right. The secularization of the United States. Not that I'm, you know, I'm a pretty secular person. I'm not saying people should go to church or synagogue or whatever. I'm just saying that those regular pillars of social engagement in our life for more and more people don't exist. Right? So the lack of those scheduled times for our relationships takes a deep psychological toll. So you have to ask yourself, how would the person I want to become spend time with the people they love, okay? Not giving them whatever scraps of time are left over between everything else, but actually booking that time. Right. How many times? Oh, we should get coffee someday. Yeah, okay. Right? That's code for never, right? So having that time with your children, your family, your parents, your siblings, your best friends, having that time on your schedule. I know many of us are at home right now during COVID Got it. Maybe one of the silver linings is that people now are more proactive about scheduling. Those Zoom calls, I think. I hope those will continue. Right? I mean, I'm spending much more time over Zoom with my parents than I was before COVID So scheduling that time, you know, with your spouse, very, very important. Having that time on your calendar to say, okay, this is our time together, Whether it's a regular date day, a walk time, whatever it might be, having that time scheduled and sacred for the people you love. And then finally, the last domain is the work domain. And when it comes to work, we have to realize there are two types of work, okay? There's what we call reactive work and reflective work. Reactive work is a part of everybody's job, okay? It's the phone calls, the meetings, the slack channels. It's reacting to whatever's happening in your work environment. And that's part of the job. I get it. Some jobs, few jobs are 100% reactive, okay? If you work in a restaurant, if you work in a call center, your job is to show up. You're not a schedule maker. You're a schedule taker. You take whatever schedule is given to you. You show up, you do whatever needs to get done. It's all reactive, okay? Or almost all reactive. Other jobs are almost all reflective. So if you're a software engineer, a marketing executive, a salesperson, you're not a schedule taker, You're a schedule maker. You have to sit down and say, wait a minute. How will I plan my day? How should I spend my time? And you have a tough job because your most important job is to figure out how to spend your time. What most people do is they take the easy default. The easy default is, I'll just take whatever comes to me. They think they're working in a reactive job, but really they're working in a reflective job. And those are the kind of people who suck at their jobs, right? Why? If you want a competitive advantage, if you want to be better than everyone else in your field, let me give you a little secret that no one else is doing. Think, think. Make time to actually sit and think in your day. You know why? Because nobody else is doing it. I promise. Almost nobody.

Yeah, they're reacting.

Exactly. They're constantly reacting. But look, to plan, to strategize, to think ahead, you have to sit down without distraction and make some time to be with yourself in your own head to figure out what to do next. Right? You have to prioritize. That takes time to think without distraction. So I implore everyone, if your job requires some level of reflection, which almost everyone's job does, give yourself that 30 minutes, 45 minutes, heck, an hour a day to work without distraction and put it on your calendar and keep it sacred. Okay? So now we have these three life domains. We have our timebox calendar. The final step is to do what we call a schedule sync. And this is what's been missing, I think, from everyone else who's been taught, who's, you know, espouses this technique of timeboxing, and it's been around again for decades and decades, is, well, what happens when in reality, I have a boss and a spouse, and I have kids and I have other people who demand my time. That schedule gets blown to bits. And the reason it gets blown to bits is because we don't do what's called a schedule sync. Here's what a schedule sync looks like. Let me destroy yet another piece of bad productivity advice, which is we've all heard that if you want to stay focused, if you want to be productive, the best thing you can do is learn how to say no, right? Haven't we all heard this advice? Learn how to say no to people. What kind of stupid advice is that, Louis? You're gonna look at your boss, the guy who pays, or the guy or gal who pays your bills, and you're gonna tell them, you know what? Boss, no.

Are you serious?

Who would give that kind of advice if you've actually had a job, you know, you can't tell your boss no. You'll get fired. So instead of telling your boss no, what you're gonna do instead is to say, hey, boss, look, can we sit down once a week, Monday morning, it's gonna take 15 minutes max, and you're gonna show them your schedule. Okay? Now that you've made a time box schedule, you're gonna show them, right, you have a physical artifact you can share with them, and you say, hey, boss, here's my schedule for the week. Here's all the stuff I'm doing okay, per the priorities at work, okay? Here's how I'm spending my time during the workday. Now, you see this other list here. Okay. I wrote down on this other list here, on this piece of paper, all this stuff I couldn't fit into my schedule for the week. Can you help me reprioritize? That's your boss's number one job. Okay. A boss's job, number one is to prioritize.

Yeah. What's the most important thing right now that you need me to do?

Exactly.

And can you have someone else support with these other tasks? Can we delegate to some other things? If you want me to do this right now, absolutely.

So if you say, look, if there's something on this list that's not in my calendar, no problem. What should I swap out?

Right.

Help me understand how to reprioritize. Exactly. Schedule syncing. Right. Schedule synchronization. So that. Exactly. So that. And let me tell you, your boss will worship the ground you walk on. I've started two startups. Most bosses have no idea how their employees are spending their time. Zero idea.

We are hiring more and more people. And, you know, luckily we're pretty good at it because we use Slack and Monday.com, so we have projects that are managed and, you know, project managers and all that. But I'm not looking in those things, so I have no idea actually what's being done. Unless I ask my project manager or my COO and say, are people even working today? I don't even know, you know? So it's. Luckily we have some of those tools. But if you were. If you were like, hey, this is my calendar for the week. The things that I'm planning to create this week.

Time boxed.

Yeah. And you were like, hey, what can we eliminate? Or how can I delegate this? Then I'm sure it would make that. That person pretty excited.

Right? Or reprioritize. Or here's the thing. The boss is thinking, what the heck are people doing all day? Right. Why aren't things happening faster? Employees are thinking, oh, my God, doesn't my boss know how much is on my plate right now?

Right, Right.

I'm overwhelmed. I'm overwork.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And this, of course, because there's no visibility into our schedules. And I'm telling you, it's 10 minutes a week. It's, you know, 15 minutes max. If you sit down and say, here's my schedule. Okay. Here's how I plan to spend my time. Help me reprioritize. If you do this, your boss will say, actually, you know what? That one thing, you know, you really don't need to be at that meeting. But that other thing is super important. Can we swap that out? This is how we get on the same page. This is how we synchronize our schedules.

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 means 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 right right now.

That does not mean most people actually who 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 like 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. They tend, 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. You have to constantly be intentional and deliberate about what you think. Otherwise and a spontaneous thought will pop back in 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, and there aren't a lot of operational definitions, as we say in science. And what I love about your question is you're asking for really getting to the meat of things, asking for the operational definitions. One of the most dangerous ideas in wellness and in popular psychology is that your body hears every thought you have. What a terrible thing to put on people, you know, what a challenging thing. I don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts. I think there is great value, however, to introducing positive thought schemes. Now the reason is not because I think, it's just because I think so, but because there's actually a neurochemical basis for controlling stress and actually making stress more tolerable and extending one's ability to be in bouts of effort. And that relates to the dopamine pathway. So the molecule dopamine is a reward. It's released in the brain when you win a game, you close a deal.

You make a love of your life.

Someone likes your photo, 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, where we're in pursuit of our goals and we think we're on the right path.

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

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

Day to day tasks, the growth, the lessons, the losses, like everything right?

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, is the hallmark of growth. Mindset is really two things. One is I'm not where I want to be now, but I, but I will, 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 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, you know, one should never confuse what is real. Right. So, no. So if you're. 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 heel, 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 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 Every time. Every time you put in effort. So every time you make for this. Let's keep it. If I were to keep it in the business context, every time you make. Write that email, every time you. Let's say it's a person who's a craftsman or a craftswoman. Every time you're working in the shop and doing that, every bit of effort, you're taking a little bit of money out of this epinephrine account. You're spending epinephrine. At some point, those levels of epinephrine get high enough that you feel like quitting. It feels exhausted. This was done in a beautiful study, actually, where they control the visual environments and they have the subjects exert effort and they can control the visual environment. So sometimes the effort of taking steps and moving forward, this is actually kind of pushing forward and kind of swimming motion would give them the sensation that they were actually making progress. And other times it was an exercise in futility where they would just keep the visual world stationary and they would expend effort and they didn't think they were going anywhere. Epinephrine is climbing, climbing, climbing. And eventually they quit. Now, dopamine is able to push back on that epinephrine and give you, anyone, the feeling that you could continue and maybe even the feeling that you want to continue. And you've seen this. Actually, football is a good example. Two teams play, say, the Super Bowl. Both teams are max effort the entire time. Max effort. The team that wins suddenly, in a moment, has the energy to jump all over the place, party for days. They can talk. I mean, they have.

They were exhausted right before that.

Well, that wasn't glycogen or stored energy of any kind, except it was neural energy. And what happened was effort is this adrenaline, Adrenaline, adrenaline, adrenaline. Eventually, people quit. They just quit. The dopamine is able to suppress that. And so then you're expending effort, but you're doing it from a place of feeling, like you have energy for it.

So we need dopamine to keep the effort going, Is that what I'm hearing you say?

That's right. Dopamine is not just about reward. It's one of the biggest misconceptions. Dopamine is about motivation and drive. It's like a jet that propels you along a path.

How do we get more dopamine?

You practice subjectively releasing dopamine in your mind.

Like, how?

Okay, so that's a great question. First of all, there are ways you can get more dopamine release through thoughts or through drugs or through supplements. I want to be really clear. There is a drug. There are two drugs, actually, that will cause massive release of dopamine. They're called cocaine and methamphetamine.

The problem is, that's what gets us addicted, because it feels so good.

The problem is. Exactly. The problem is cocaine and methamphetamine stimulate so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source. It becomes the goal and the path. It becomes the path and the destination. And you look at people's lives when they do a lot of cocaine and methamphetamine, and that baseline on their life goes down very high because there's no.

Reason to work hard at anything else. Because you feel good.

That's right.

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

That's right. If you think about, Remember these neurochemical systems. Adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, epinephrine. They weren't designed to keep us safe from tigers and to hunt and gather or to build Fortune 500 companies. They were designed to do anything. They were designed to be generic so that depending on our circumstances, we could adapt. So in an animal context, an animal that, say, is hunting or it needs food for its young, it's going to feel agitation. That's stress, that's cortisol. It's like hunger. My babies might not eat. I might not eat. Maybe it's looking for a mate. It's going to feel agitation and start looking and roaming and searching. Foraging, it's called. In the animal behavior world, it's foraging. At some point, it might catch a smell of something, a potential mate, or berries or a stream. If it's thirsty at that moment, dopamine is released and now it has energy to continue along that path. Whereas there's a specific pathway in the brain that's involved in depression and disappointment, that if it goes to that place and turns out it was the wrong path, there's a signal that actually suppresses dopamine so that you don't repeat that mistake again.

So you don't give up.

That's right.

You just don't repeat it again.

That's right. And those events.

So it reminds you, like, that's not the path to go down.

That's right. Interesting. And we're sort of veering towards neuroplasticity here, which is the brain's ability to change itself in response to experience. Dopamine is one of the strongest triggers of neuroplasticity. Because it says those actions led to success previously. You're going to repeat those, those actions led to failure previously and don't repeat those.

So dopamine triggers us to stay on the right path.

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

Is there too much, Is there too much, Is there such thing as too much dopamine if you're not on drugs?

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

There's a method that you give or a model for how to become limitless. And if we don't follow this model, then something's going to be broken in our life.

Isn't that right?

Yeah. Business model really is a framework for learning anything faster. So for people who are listening and watching and they want to learn a language, they want to learn Mandarin, music, martial arts, management, marketing, any skill, I think if there's one skill to Master in the 21st century, it's our ability to learn faster. Like if there was a genie, and a genie could grant you any one wish, but only one wish, what would you wish for? If there was only one wish, what would you wish for?

Most people would say money or this or that. But you think learning is the.

I mean, I think a lot of.

People, I think being the matrix, like downloading the matrix so I can learn Jiu Jitsu in a second.

Exactly.

If I can learn a language in a second, if I can have this skill.

So I think the hack a lot of people would do is if it was any one wish, they would wish for more wishes, right? They would ask for infinite wishes. So the equivalent, if I was your learning genie and I could grant you any one wish to learn any subject or any skill, just like become a master at it. The equivalent. What's the equivalent of the answer of asking for infinite wishes? It would be learning how to learn. Because if you can learn how to learn, the world is yours. Especially today. Because nobody who's listening and watching gets paid for their brute strength. It's their brain strength. It's not your muscle power. It's completely your mind power. And the challenge is your brain doesn't come with an owner's manual. It's not user friendly. And that's the reason why I wrote this book. But the Limitless model is an explanatory schema, a framework for learning anything faster. And not only that, but really for accessing our human potential. Because I think if there's one infinite limitless resource on planet Earth, it's human capability. There's no limit on our determination, there's no limit to our imagination, there's no known limit to our creativity. And yet we're not shown how to be able to access that. And so this framework is a three part framework. And what I would offer everyone to do is I love to turn this into like a little master class, make it really engaging and so don't listen passively because we don't learn through. The human brain doesn't learn through consumption. It learns through creation and creativity and getting involved in things. And I know a lot of us learn faster when we actually roll up our sleeves and do it. So I would encourage everybody as they're working out or cleaning the house or whatever they're doing at the same time to try to get involved in this.

Well, I think as an athlete, I can speak to that. Because for me in school, it's really hard to remember or learn things because I didn't feel like I was participating in a way that worked for me. But as an athlete playing basketball, when a coach would tell me, okay, I want you to watch this video and then automatically shoot in a certain way with your hand positioned this way and follow through this way just by watching a video and not actually implementing and practicing it. He would take me out on the court and we would practice it and do it over and over again. And he Would correct me and I would learn through muscle memory as opposed to just watching something and then thinking I can do it without actually practicing. So putting it into practice quickly for me is how I learned sports, and it's how I try to apply it in other areas of my life as opposed to just, I'm going to learn and then, okay, I know it, I feel like I need to work in it.

I feel you get dirty.

You know what I mean?

I do, I do. I think a lot of people, this is the thing. It's not how smart you are. It's not literally not how, like how smart you are, it's how are you smart? It's not how smart you are, how smart your kids are, how smart your business partner is, it's how are they smart? Are you smart?

What's the difference?

So you are smart through experiential learning, like in the book we talk about. Exactly. It's not how smart somebody is, like their IQ or the intelligence, it's how are they smart?

Smart.

And it's always context dependent. And so some people learn. We talk about learning styles in the book. It's like, have you ever been interested? Just like you were saying, you're interested in a topic but you're not getting it. Because sometimes the way you prefer to learn is different than the way the teacher prefers to teach. And it's like you're two ships in the night and you pass each other and you don't even realize there's no connection. You don't even realize the other one is there. And it feels uncomfortable. Like if I asked everybody as an exercise to take out a piece of paper, I encourage everyone to take notes because I'm going to drop a lot of, like, practical methods when you're taking. If you were to write your name first and last on a piece of paper, actually you could do it right now, first and last. And everyone encourages you to just do this. Or imagine you're writing your name first and last on a piece of paper. And then when you're done, I want you to switch hands and in your opposite hand, right below it, write your first and last name with your opposite hand.

I don't even know if it takes me 10 minutes.

And so while people are doing it, you'll notice when you're doing with the opposite hand as we're doing it. That's actually pretty good. That if I was to ask you which one is the, which one was easier, first or second? And you would say the first was easier, which one is more comfortable first or last?

The first one.

The first one. So not only was it faster, it was easier. And then which one was higher quality? Let's check that out.

This, the first one, hopefully the first.

One'S higher quality also as well. And so here's the thing that means the second time it took longer. The second time it also was not as comfortable. And the second time also, the quality wasn't quite as good. And here's the thing, when I'm saying it's how you learn. Some people are trying to learn something with the opposite hand, so it takes longer, it feels weird, and the quality is not quite as good, as opposed to if you're using your dominant hand.

So how do we know how to learn with our dominant hand as opposed to the opposite hand?

Yeah. And that's a metaphor for how we like to take in information. Some people like to learn by reading. Some people, they just cannot get through a book, though. They have to listen to that audio or that podcast, other people.

Or watch someone lecturing it or talking about it.

Exactly. And so we all have different styles, and it's not right or wrong. Now we can actually improve our ability to read. We actually can improve. Improve our ability to listen and apply. So if there are areas where we feel weak, you know, this book is a guide, a guidebook to be able to level up those areas. So you could be more of a whole brain learner also as well. But really, when it comes to accelerated learning, it's not again, how smart you are, it's how are you smart? And that honors us. And it takes the judgment out. Sometimes in school, it's like the top 10% get A's, another 10% get B's. And then 80% were like, you and I, it's like, it's like we're. It's like we're failing school as opposed to the way school maybe is failing us. Because school teaches you what to learn, what to focus on, what to think, what to remember, but not how to learn. And how to think.

Well, it teaches you how to think and learn in one way.

Exactly, exactly. And when I talk about, in the book, I talk about the four super villains that are holding you back in your work, in your schooling, in your life is driven by technology. But one of them is digital deduction, where we're depending on technology to tell us what to think. We're not even using the children right now. They're finding that their reasoning abilities, their ability to analyze critical thinking is not as sharp as where it should be because of Technology, because technology is doing the thinking for us and our mind, I'm going to say this repeatedly, is like a muscle. It's use it or lose it. And just like when you go, you have your personal trainer to make your muscles stronger, more energized, more flexible, more pliable, you know, more. You want your mental muscles to be stronger, more energized, more pliable, more, more flexible. And so many people refer to me as a brain coach because what I do is I train your brain because I think we're in the millennium of the mind, and it's really about mental fitness. Our ability to adapt, our ability to think, our ability to solve problems. And this really is everything. When people see me wearing brain shirts all the time or pointing to my brain, the reason why I do that is because what you see, you take care of. You see your hair, you take care of your hair. You see your skin, you take care of your skin, you see your clothing, you take care of your clothing.

Don't see your brain.

Exactly. And that controls everything. And so when I point to the brain or honor with their shirts, just like people have their emotions on their sleeve, you know, I have my brain on my chest because I want to put it forefront to remind people to love their brain, to care for their brain.

Yeah, I think it's. I mean, that's why a lot of people, doctors and nutritionists are talking about gut health. It's like we can't see it, but we can start to feel rashes or we can start to feel the effects of it. I think it's also heart health is a big thing right now. It's just like the emotional health, self care, self love. You know, mental health and emotional health kind of tie together.

And I love your work because you bring that to everybody, to the world, and it's all connected. I talk about in the book, you know, there's this heart intelligence and also your gut, as you mentioned, a lot of people call it your second brain. It's the second highest concentration of nerve cells, really. And so. And there's. And it's connected too. And sometimes what you eat affects what, how you think. We know that because of the guests we've had on our shows and everything else, that when you eat junk food, which is not just not really a thing, there's junk and then there's food.

There's sugar and there's food.

Exactly. And what you eat matters, especially for your gray matter. I remember in our previous episode, we did years ago, I showed people how to memorize the brain, foods, and all of the best neuroprotective. This area of neuronutrition. It's really fascinating that your brain has different nutritional requirements than the rest of your body. But I'm going back to the limitless model. There are three keys to reaching your goals. And this is my distinction here because originally I remember years ago when you prompted me to write this book, you're like, Jim, you know, it's been, you know, over two decades. You gotta do something, put something in this book. And so because, you know, fundamentally, I'm a reading teacher and, you know, somebody has decades, why I love reading. If somebody has decades of experience and they put into a book like you, and all of a sudden people could read that book in a few days. They could download decades into days. And readers are leaders. We know that reading is, to your mind, what exercises your body. It's the best mental fitness. And so the limitless model as an exercise, what I want everyone to do. So it's not hypothetical because in part of the book, I demystify the seven lies of learning. There are seven lies that hold you back to learning. And one of them is knowledge is power. We hear that all the time. I've even said it also as well. But when we think about it, is it really true? Right? Is knowledge just knowing something give you power? No, not unless you act on it. Not unless you apply it. So knowledge times action equals. Equals power. And so I would encourage everybody as you're listening to this to take immediate action. And there are three questions I want you to ask as you're listening to this episode to make it very valuable. And I would encourage you to write these down. Three master questions. Questions. You know, we were talking about some of the famous actors that I work on before we started filming. And we're, you know, Will Smith did the COVID endorsement of the book that says, you know, Jim Kwik, you know, gets the maxim out of me as a human being. I've learned so much from this, this man. Just being around so many, around, around clients. And what have you learned from Will? So one of the things is this, this idea of we were in Toronto and I help actors speed read scripts, help them to memorize their lines faster. I mean, imagine like 30 pages of scripts. There's a lot of information.

I can't remember a sentence.

There's a lot, right? And some of them have their strategies. And no matter how great somebody is, you know this because you study, you make, you know, your life about studying and researching greatness. They Always know there's another level and they get really good at the fundamentals and the basics. But one of the things when we're, when we're there. We spent the day together and it was wintertime in Toronto. They were filming from 6pm to 6am, which can you imagine, like so hard, like nighttime, that's very difficult. But during the day we went through an exercise and I believe so in there I talk about how we have 50 to 70,000 thoughts a day, right? And these thoughts are controlling our lives. And a lot of those thoughts are questions that we ask ourselves. You know, thinking is that process of asking and answering questions. And if people are asking, is that true? Notice you had to ask a question to define if it's true or not. Right. And there's certain questions we ask more than any other question. So here's the thing. I talk about dominant questions that you have. One, two, three questions that you ask a lot. And I want everyone to think about what your dominant questions are, including you. And I'll give you a couple examples to get you started. So, for example, one of my friends, we went through this exercise of meditating and writing, journaling down. We found out her dominant question is, how do I get people to like me? How do I get people to like me? Now, she asked that question all the time. And you don't know anything about her. You don't know her age, you don't know her background, you don't know what she does for a living, you know what she looks like, you know where she lives. You don't know anything about her. But you know a lot about her. If you asked yourself, how do I get people to like me hundreds of times a day? What, what's her personality? What's her personality going to be like? What's her life going to feel?

Well, I guess it could be. It could be either side of the spectrum. She could be super outgoing and super adventurous to try to get people to be more attracted to her. Or she could be super shy and introverted because she's so worried about what people think about her. So that's the first thing I thought of. But I'm not sure if that's true.

And it's absolutely true. She actually does both of those things.

Really.

I mean, if you ask yourself, how do I get people to like me, then what are you doing? You're people pleasing all the time. You're a sycophant just saying yes to everything. You people take advantage of you because you're martyring yourself because they're always trying to do. They're making themselves less than. Or their personality is never consistent because their personality changes.

The chameleon they change for people.

Exactly. And you know all that about her, and you only know one question she asks herself, and that's one of her dominant questions. I would offer everybody who's listening to this. What do you think your dominant question is? Because questions are the answer. You know this from the work that you do in high performance and greatness, that the questions you ask determine what you focus on. You have part of your brain called the reticular activating system, RAS for short, and it's your filtering system. So at any given time, there's a billion stimuli that we could be paying attention to. And primarily, your brain is a deletion device. It's trying to keep information out. Otherwise you would go crazy. Right. If you paid attention to everything. So what gets in? So, for example, years ago, my little sister started sending me emails and postcards and pictures and photograph of a very specific kind of dog. It was a pug dog. You know those men in black dog. Yes, exactly. Very smushy faces. They're very compliant. You could dress them up as ballerinas and they don't. They don't care. And she starts, and I didn't know why. So my question was like, why is she sending me these pictures all the time? That became quite a dominant question of the day. And then I realized her birthday was coming up. So she's a smart marketer, right? Planting those seeds. And here's the magic, though. I started seeing pug dogs everywhere. Everywhere. I would go to the grocery store, I'd be checking out, and I swear to you, woman's carrying a pug dog at the register. I would be running and jogging in my neighborhood, and somebody's walking six pug dogs. Now my question for everybody is, did these pug dogs magically appear all of a sudden in the world? No. They were always there, but they were not. I wasn't paying attention to them because they weren't important because I wasn't asking that question. Once you ask a question, you start to pay attention to those things, and that focus determines how you feel, determines your behaviors. And primarily, it's so interesting. It's kind of like social media. There's an algorithm to your mind. Like there's an algorithm, algorithm to Facebook and Instagram that what you engage with the most, you like and you share, you comment, you start seeing more of those kind of things. Right? And so just like your mind, once you Start engaging with. If you start watching all this news about fear and all the things that are going on, you start paying attention and your mind just starts focusing automatically becomes a reaction, a reflex, and you.

Start to attract more of the fear and anxiety or worry that's in the.

World that's being posted very much.

So you start to subscribe to whatever that is to receive more of it.

Exactly.

So you're thinking about it.

So just like on social media, if you start just liking all the cat stuff and everything else, they'll just start feeding you cat stuff. And same thing with negativity and same thing with opportunity also as well. So the questions make a difference. So questions are the answer.

What are the two questions you've been that are dominant in your mind over the last five years the most?

Yeah. So for learning, because I grew up with the broken brain, many people know my story from the last episode when they see me do these demonstrations at summit series or, you know, events you.

And I have remembering a thousand per people's names, right?

Ten minutes, all of that kind of stuff. I say that I don't do this to impress you. I do this to express to you what's possible. Because the truth is we could all do that and a whole lot more. We just weren't taught, if anything, we're taught a lie that somehow our intelligence is fixed, like our shoe size. But I do it as a demonstration because I grew up with. With learning difficulties, right? I had my brain injury when I was five. I fell, had a very bad fall when I was in kindergarten. Rushed to the hospital before I was curious and very energized, my parents would say. But then I became very shut down. And my superpower growing up was being invisible. It was shrinking because I didn't want the spotlight. I didn't want to be called on. So I was literally, physiologically, I was always trying to look smaller to protect myself so teachers wouldn't call on me or I wouldn't be bullied or something like that.

I would do that as well. Except I was just a giant in the class. So I had to do. Always picked on.

So for me, I would actually be sitting behind you and I would be guaranteed no one would be able to see me. But going back to my question, my question became all the time. First of all, when I was nine years old, I was slowing the class down and a teacher pointed to me and said, that's the boy with a broken brain. And that label became my limit. And so we have. Think about when you're Listening to this, what are the labels that we put on ourselves? It's like we're not born, we're born with a blank slate, right? But through experience, through expectations of other people, through our environment, we learned that we are limited. And the good news is we can unlearn it. And that's the point of the book. But because I was in the broken state, I would always ask myself, you know, why am I broken? Why am I the stupid one? I started getting answers of why I'm so stupid, right? Every time I did badly on a test, I would be like, oh, because I have the broken brain, right? If I was in pick in sports, I'd be like, oh, because I'm the broken one. And that became my self talk. Adults have to be very careful with their external words because they become a child's internal words. But later I started to get so frustrated, I started asking, getting curious. And when you're curious, you start to ask different questions. I was like, why, why is that person so why, why are they, are they so smart? And how come I'm studying three times harder and getting less grades than, than them, right? And I started getting answers. My primary question started, my dominant question ended up being like, how do I make this better? But the three questions that I focus on, and let me tell you first what will's is Will Smith's, one of his dominant questions when we went through this exercise is how do I make this moment even more magical? How do I make this moment even more magical? It used to be every moment or like an act, this moment, this any moment, like, and it shows up right in his, in his life. Because later that night when we're filming, it was like 2 o' clock in the morning and his family, we're all outside for the superhero movie that many people know of. And it was really cold because it was in Toronto and it was, it was winter time. And we're all just waiting and just waiting and waiting and waiting because people think that and you meet all these people all the time on your show and they think it's so glamorous.

They're just hurry up and wait.

Exactly. And I asked him this question because I believe genius leaves clues. I was like, you know, how do you prepare? How do you get ready when the director, you're just sitting here for hours and then the director calls on you, how do you get ready? And he was like, jim, I don't have to get ready, I stay ready. And I'm like, wow, that's good to be Will. Smith.

It's hard to stay ready for six hours.

Yeah, exactly. But that's just who he is. Because I believe the life you live are the lessons you teach. The life you live are the lessons you teach others. Going back to his Dominic question, his family was there also at the same time visiting the set. And, you know, from West Philly, you know, the song, and we're all outside and shivering. And when he wasn't shooting, he would. He would bring us back blankets. He would make hot chocolate and bring it to us. He would crack jokes. He would live that. That dominant question. Because the life he lives, he like, how do I make this moment even more magical? Now, before, it was like, how do I make this moment magical? Then we played with it, like, even more magical, presuming it is already magical and amazing. And so these questions we ask are very important. Now, there are three questions. When I said there's turning knowledge into power that I want everyone to obsess about, I mean, this will make you a master. And if you get it, this is it. Three questions to turn knowledge into power. Because knowledge alone is potential power. Number one, how can I use this? When you're listening to this podcast, moving forward, every time you listen to it, I want you to ask yourself, how can I use this? Get obsessed about this. Like, even write it down. And this is where your mind can be very creative. Because in here, I teach a power of note taking. Because people don't realize this. When you listen to a podcast or you go to, you know, a summit or an event or have a great conversation with somebody, within two days, 80% of it is gone. We forget it. They call it the forgetting curve. And one of the ways to retain it is by taking notes. Exactly what you're doing. Now, I encourage people to take notes. A very specific way is to take. Put a line right down the page, and on the left side of the page, I want you to take notes, and on the right side, I want you to make notes. So on the left side of the page, you're taking notes. You're. You're listening, right? You're capturing information. You're like, this is how Jim remembers name. This is how Jim reads a book a day or whatever it is. So you're on the left side you're capturing, but on the right side, you're creating. Now, that's a subtle difference. On the left side, your note taking. On the right side, you're note making. What's the difference? Again, on the left side, you're taking notes. You're writing down the quotes and the strategies, the processes, but on your right side, what you're doing, the right side, creativity. Instead of your mind being distracted when you're listening, have it be distracted on, focused on, how can I use this? On the right side is where you're writing your impressions of what you're learning. How can I use this? Another great question, second dominant question I would ask is not only how can I use it, because you come up with all these answers, just like I see you start seeing pug dogs everywhere. It's like, oh, this is how I could use this in my relationship. This is how I could use it, you know, in my career. Second question I would ask is, why must I use this? Why must I use this? You know, we know one of the people that endorsed my book, he's on your show is Simon Sinek. And you know, one of my favorite books, I'm going to mention a lot of books, including your own. Start with, you know, his is start with why? Right? And so why must I use this? So once you have all these ideas of how can I use this? Why must I use this? Because if you don't have the reasons, you won't get the results right.

You won't care enough about it.

Exactly. Reasons reap results. I'm gonna give a lot of people a lot of quickisms here because it goes from your head to your heart to your hands. You could affirm things in your head all day, set goals in your head all day, but if you're not acting with your hands, you're procrastinating, putting things off, check in with your second age, which is your heart, which are the emotions, right? Because we are not logical, we are biological. Dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins. This chemical soup drives us to act. Just like people don't buy logically, they don't fall in love logically, they do these things emotionally. So find your emotions. And in this book we do, we really uncover, and I decode motivation, not motivation getting hyped up and dancing on chairs. And then the next day, not changing. We figured out this formula of sustainable motivation in this book. But the second question is, go back to why must I use this? Because if you don't have the why, you won't do the what. And then finally, the third question, first question, how can I use this? Write all the answers down, think about that second question, why must I use it? Gives you the energy and the fuel and the drive to do it. And finally, when will I Use this. When will I use this? Because we know that one of the most important performance productivity tools that we have is our calendar. Yeah, right. If it's not in our calendar, it just doesn't get done.

What's the best way to train the emotional part of the brain so that we are in. We have a personal power over it. That's a good way that we have.

Or more.

It depends on the situation.

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

Depending on what's going on.

Yeah.

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

Maybe the moment is so big, man. It's, of course, you're just emotionally over the top and we know that's what's been going on the last couple years and even today. So. But that, but that leaves you a flexibility and it also leaves you without feeling bad, like, oh, I was emotional then, Now I'm not a person that has emotional regulation. You don't have this brain the same forever. It's a constant trimming of the sails, modulating tone. To me, it's a little bit of work. If you're in a good spot, like, hey, this ain't guaranteed. But it's also so much power and opportunity that if you're not in a good spot, tomorrow can be better. And if not tomorrow, then the month or the year after. Right. So emotional regulation. The shortcut. So now we're getting to like, is there a tip? You know, because I hope people feel like, wait a second, this, everything is possible, but it's going to take a lot of work. Okay, that's really what I was trying to get at for the first part. But are there shortcuts? Because I love shortcuts with LA freeways or whatever.

Right. Ways is good. Yeah.

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

Something you study with actual scans or.

No, no, no, it's even.

It's wilder than that.

If you have aberrant brain electricity and we check a scan and there's some funky marble type tuft of brain tissue that doesn't look right, we know, like that's the epicenter. That's where the electricity is sprouting from. But some people, they have it. Some kids that have it, some adults, they have It. There isn't a. There isn't anything wrong with the scan.

Right.

The scan looks pretty. Brain looks perfect. But the electricity's off.

Right.

That's what epilepsy is. All right. That's yet another proof. Seizures. One seizure, two seizures is epilepsy. Then you get the diagnosis. But yes, seizures is aberrant electrical activity of the brain. The same things we've been talking about. So when we don't know where it's sprouting. Because if it's from a small space, we can dissect it out and take away the epicenter. Right.

You mean you can cut it out?

We can cut it out. And the patients are seizure free.

Really?

Yeah. Now. But what if there isn't a spot that we find and their seizures are horrible and it's. Well before thinking about removing half the brain. So what they would do is we make a reverse question mark incision. It's a scalp. It's not very tender. That's what they tell me. Tell me. Ribs are more tender is what they say. Patients. Then we make our little ice fishing hole.

Are they numb when they're taking this off?

For this one, they're asleep. There's others, they're awake.

Do you numb the skull? The skin. You just cut through the skin? No, numbing.

They're fully asleep. Oh.

But when they're awake, then at the.

Very end, I inject the cut. So the numbing lasts the longest with numbing.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

You're not just sitting there awake, they're just cutting it off.

That is an operation we do, but that's a different story. So you take the skull off, the brain has a covering. You don't see the brain right away. This is like a sheath.

Like a skin?

No, it's like almost a nylon material. You can pick it up and stitch it. That's what keeps the water inside the skull. It's not the bone sack. Yeah, brain sack. There you go.

It's a brain sack. Right. It's like.

It's nylon. It's pretty. And we cut it and then the clear water pours out. You can see the surface of the.

Brain and water's coming out.

Yeah. Because the brain is floating in an aquarium, right? Yeah. It's buoyant. Your brain doesn't sit on bone. It's floating again.

Jellyfish and water. So when you're hitting, when you're having a lot of fast actions and you're hitting something, is it hitting?

Yeah.

Your skull stops and then inside, it sloshes into the inside.

That can't be good for you, is it?

That's where all the CTE and football stuff is the issue. And it's a sudden stops, repeated sudden stops with the brain sloshing and hitting the inside surface of your skull.

That can't be good, can it?

Well, people are pretty. People get by. But we're seeing that if you do it too much, as with kids and NFL people. But. So you got to open. Then there's a little size of a deck of a card. It's got a little 96 or different electrodes on it. You put the deck of the card on the naked brain. You take those wires, you pop them out with little needles through the back, almost like. Yeah. And then you put the bone back on and you stitch up the scalp. And then you put some numbing medicine and you put on a head wrap. And they hang out in the hospital for weeks because you're waiting for the seizure to happen.

So you've got a pad on the brain, a grid.

So when the seizure sparks, we can see. It was. It was like in Connect 4 or Battles.

Battle.

Was that.

Was that board game Battleship? Yeah, it's in. It's in two.

You know where it's at?

Yeah, you know where it's at?

2, 6.

Because that way, you know where you can.

So there's a. There's a mesh pad, electromagnetic pad or something that can track with wires that are coming out of the back of.

This, connected to the monitor, that are.

Connected to the monitor at all times.

And they're there for a couple weeks.

Insanity. Because they're happy. They're fine like us, hanging out. Let's give me some ice cream, play some video games, watch some tv.

So what happened was a bunch of.

The wires coming out of their necks.

Yeah, but the scalp. Yeah, but we have things people, you know, you'd be surprised with what we.

Can wrapped it up.

What kind of devices we put in and dangle from people, you know, from broken legs. They come up with those little metal grids and they move around.

So.

So then after a few weeks, you. You wait till a seizure happens.

And then we know where under that grid where it sparked, we found the epicenter.

And then from that, you track the data. You have the recording of the data, and then you can go in and then tweak it, or you remove that little part, and then they're done.

They don't have seizures anymore sometimes, or they're reduced. Now, here's something that's more interesting for you and your audience. Well, that's a boring couple of weeks. So a bunch of cognitive science students and brain students and all, they come in and they started hanging out with them, and they said, hey, can we go through these lessons of paced breathing and meditative breathing?

Can we do this without removing it?

Yeah, well, completely unrelated to the clinical work. Well, we're hanging. I've got a direct feed of the true electricity from the surface of the neck.

While they're breathing?

Yeah, while they're sitting there. So they do something new with them. They teach them meditative breathing.

Come on. What are you seeing on the brain activity recordings?

The same thing that we see when we give Valium, which is an anxiolytic. Their anxiety level goes down, Their electricity goes from fast to medium. Remember, we started this and we're talking about athletes not wanting to be in fast. We want to be in the flow state. Meditative breathing led to direct changes in the electricity of their brain as measured not with a sticker on the forehead, but with a grid on the surface of the naked brain.

It's true.

It's true. Measurable changes in the electricity, therefore the mind. So meditative breathing that for thousands of years people have said can help you chill out is an anxiolytic and break anxiety. Well, we have proof of that now. And I think that's important for people to know that it's not just some, you know, it's just not a concept that's being thrown around too casually. That through awake, direct electrophysiologic recording of seizure, planning surgery at elite centers while looking for the seizures. There's a lot of data coming out about, let's play video games, let's do meditative breathing, let's read and then what changes. And so that's what I love in book one that I shared was that's raw data. That's real data. And there's an explanation behind how that happens. And so what I would say to people is, that's something you have that's free, because I'm not selling anything. Breathing and the pace of breathing and.

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

They found, you know, it doesn't matter. People say through your nose or mouth, and that's kind of the confusing stuff that's out there. Well, the nodes in the mouth connect before they get to the trachea, and it goes to your lungs, so it doesn't matter how, but it's about slowing the cadence and making the cadence more methodical. A deep breath, you Know, deep breath in and a deep breath out. It's no different than what we do in surgery. When you feel the case getting a little out of your control, what do you do? Well, the first thing is I just slow my breathing down and that doesn't mean the solution will arise, but I know that puts me in my most calm and focused state to find the solution for the problem in front of me. And likely that's what athletes that thrive do as well.

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

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

Yeah.

You will give yourself anxiety by just doing that.

Yeah, I felt that just for a second.

I'm showing you the proof on the other side. Do the opposite of hyperventilation and you'll make yourself less frenetic.

What would you say are the five things that if people did these five things every single day on a consistent basis, their happiness level would go up a point or two consistently over time. And it doesn't cost any money and it doesn't take a ton of time, but if you did these five things, your life would start to be a lot happier.

Yeah.

Well, I think we just talked about one. I think this act of becoming other oriented, however that works for you, whether that's, you know, donating an hour of your time or just like holding the door open for somebody, you know, giving some money, like we all can probably, you know, have enough disposable income to spare a teensy weensy bit. And so what can you do to spend that money on or that time or whatever on other people? So that would be topic. That would be number one. I think number two would be another thing you just echoed in terms of how you were talking about changing your life, which is to show up for other people. So all the research suggests that happy people are really social. They tend to talk to random strangers, they tend to be around other people, and they really make time for the people that they care about in their life. And so I think this would be kind of big change. Number two is like, how can you just be reaching out to people more often? And I think, you know, this is one of these things where like, we kind of know it, but we don't often put it into practice.

Right.

You know, if you found out you were on your deathbed you know, this week. And, you know, you had a week to live. You might not, like, go to work like you. You'd probably, like, want to focus on those people you care about in your life, like, whoever they are. You would see your friends, you would hang out with your family that you care about. You know, you put time into your romantic relationship, whatever. That's what you do. But if you look at how we tend to spend our time, it's, you know, we're caught up in work. Sometimes we're not even present with our family members when we're around them, you know, because we're like, you know, let me put the phone down kind of thing. And so. But. But happy people don't do that. They're priorit right now. And so whatever you can do to shift to being a little more social and a little more kind of social and again, connected with the people you care about, that's like.

So it doesn't have to be strangers socially or fake friends, but being social with people you care about on a.

Consistent basis, it can actually be the strangers. In fact, there's one study by researcher Nick Epley and his colleagues where he just like. I mean, psychologists are always forcing people to do stuff with money, but he. So he forces people with money to talk to strangers on the train. He does this on the L train in Chicago. So he says, you know, for the next half hour, you have to talk to somebody and make a connection. People predict this is going to be actively miserable and weird and cheesy and all this stuff.

Amazing. You did an episode on this, too.

Exactly. Yeah. So that's one of our famous episodes. I actually got hate mail after that episode because people are like, you're crazy. Telling people talk to people on the train, like you're going to get people killed and all this stuff. But I think that's how strong our intuitions are. Right. Is that we, you know, we really think, oh, my God, talking to some random person in the coffee shop. I'd rather just pull out my phone and check my Instagram feed. But again, our minds are leading us in the wrong direction here.

Okay. All right, so the first two are others oriented and showing up for others?

Yeah. I think the third one would be to kind of focus on the power of gratitude again. It always sounds so cheesy when you mention these things. But, you know, sometimes science is cheesy. But, you know, I think our instinct when things are good and when things are bad is that it's funny to kind of gripe about Stuff, Right. You know, like, it's funny to kind of complain. You probably even have people in your life that whenever you see them, you just start, like, the complaining fest, like, happens. But that's not what happy people do. Happy people are spontaneously counting their blessings. And this is a spot where I think popular culture has gotten onto something with things like gratitude lists or gratitude journals, like, just taking time to count your blessings, Even if it's like 30 seconds at night. You can see statistical boosts in happiness within about two weeks of that practice.

I do this with my girlfriend every night before we go to bed. We both say three things we're grateful for. And it puts our mind at peace. It gives us a moment of reflection, of even if, you know, there's a lot of stress in the world with the virus and the pandemic and everything. Even with all that, it's still good things to be, things to be grateful for. So it's just reminding ourselves to calm our mind down before we go to bed. And then when we sleep, we have a grateful heart. You wake up with a grateful heart as opposed to an angry heart. And I think the more you go to sleep frustrated, angry, and ruminating over things you don't have or you don't like about what's happening in your life, the sleep isn't as quality, and you wake up more tired and you become more reactive the next day. And that's why I think you're right. The power of gratitude. This is something that I swear by. Without it, I'd be unhappy.

Yeah. No, I think. I mean, again, it's all about also, like, kind of just being mindful of these things. Right. I mean, sometimes I'll leave a, like, grapefest with a friend and just notice and be like, I feel really crappy now, you know, like, getting all that off my chest and, like, complaining about whatever. But no, no, I think. Yeah. And there's lots of evidence suggesting that gratitude can have a specifically powerful effect on sleep. Even things like immune function, like, it makes our immune systems work better, which is something else we need right now in the context of this virus.

How much does griping or talking about the things you don't like, how much does that actually affect your happiness? I mean, I'm all for creating a container where I'm saying, hey, listen, for the next 10 minutes, I just want to share things I'm frustrated about. But then here's all the things I'm grateful for to kind of get both of them out. Yeah, but is there science or research that Says, like, if you talk about negative things or you complain with your friends, or you talked about what you don't, like, gossip, it's going to bring your happiness level down. Or is this just a theory?

Yeah, I mean, it's more, it's less that. So I think part of it is how you're griping, right. And so you can gripe about like, everything's terrible, everything's terrible, and therefore I'm going to problem solve by doing X, Y and Z. If you do that where you're kind of griping to problem solve, then that can be really powerful because it can be kind of identifying problems and then fixing them. But if you're griping just to like, gripe, gripe, gripe, gripe, gripe, and there's no like forward motion on it, there's no solutions. Exactly. That's not really helpful. And it comes at opportunity cost. You could be spending that time talking about what you're grateful for. So what I try to do with friends now is, you know, because I definitely still have friends where, you know, they're in gripe headspace, you know, you know, that's, that's what they're gonna do. But like, whenever we're in that space, either move it more towards problem solving, like, oh, yeah, okay, that co worker is a pain in the butt. But like, what can we do to situation better? What can we, you know, so. So try to move it towards problem solving or try to do exactly what you said, which is like, you know, you can fill up your frustration bucket, but kind of match it with a bucket that's equally filled with.

Yeah, okay, so that's number three, power of gratitude.

Yeah. Number four is kind of a smushed one, but it's basically smush it up. Yeah, it's like I'll throw together a bunch of things under the context of like, healthy habits. And by what. By that. What I mean is, like, things we know are good for our physical health, but we often forget that our physical health and our mental health are intertwined. So, you know, getting some regular exercise and movement in, making sure you're prioritizing sleep and having good sleep habits. So it's not just like you plop down for a certain number of hours a night, but you're really trying to do things before you go to bed and during your day to make sleep better. Even healthy eating. Like, we don't. We forget the connection between our gut and our brain, between our bodies and our brain, between our stress levels in our brain. And so we really have to kind of make sure we're protecting our physical health because that has a huge implication on our mental health.

Yeah. I just had a doctor on Today, actually On my show, Dr. Stephen Gundry, who talks about essentially how to boost the immune system, how to reverse disease, how to de age all these things about the body. And he was a heart surgeon for 40 years and stopped doing heart surgeries because he realized that wasn't solving the root problem. Nutrition and other things solved the root problem of disease. And he was saying all disease is stemmed from like a leaky gut. And the foods we eat create a holes in the gut where things seep through, and then it causes eczema and it causes different disease because the immune system is broken down, which attracts disease. And so it's all about the things we eat to make sure we boost our immune system and we feel better, we have greater energy. And it also connects to the brain, everything. The heart, the brain and the gut. So just like you said, I think that's a great, A great point.

So you're pushing, but I mean, the exercise and sleep connection is even, you know, I mean, there's evidence suggesting that like a half hour of cardio every day is as effective as a prescription of Zoloft for reducing depression symptoms. Right. So these psychiatrists, you know, might not make as much money if they're prescribing, hey, hop on the treadmill or your peloton, you know, for a half hour. But that's what the data suggests. And then same thing with sleep. I feel like we could solve most of the mental health crisis on college campuses if we just got these kids to sleep.

That's it.

If they just want. Exhausted. Overwhelmed and exhausted is a combination for unhappiness.

Exactly. And not making good decisions and not learning and doing all the stuff we need them to do on college.

Yeah. And then just needing the sugar fix to like stay awake and needing some adrenaline. So checking social media or whatever it is, doing the wrong choice to get the fix to keep them awake or have some attention because they're so distracted. Okay, so the fourth was a smush of movement. Healthy habits, healthy habits, healthy habits, sleep, all those things. And then what would you say? The fifth one?

And I think the fifth one, I mean, again, I'm, you know, cutting off here, but I think the fifth one would be finding ways to practice being more mindful and being more present. And I mean that in a couple ways. You know, one is like, you know, the standard Buddha meditationy way to be present where you're like paying attention to the present moment, but it's also just like paying attention to your body and where you are with things. I mean, we mentioned this a little bit. When you're thinking about the griping of, like afterwards, after that gripe fest session, I'm like, I feel kind of yucky. You know, maybe after you, like, do something nice and give somebody something at Starbucks, you have a presence and notice, like, I feel kind of good, like my heart feels warmed, I'm breathing in a different way and so on. And so I think, you know, we constantly have these theories about what we should be doing with our time, but if we actually pay attention to how our bodies feel and be present during it, we can see whether we're going in the right direction, the wrong direction. For me, this is so true on social media in general, but particularly right now during the virus. Right. It's like I have this intuition of like, I'm like bored or feeling a little anxious. Like, I'm gonna just do a quick Twitter check. I'm just gonna hop on Facebook just for a second. And if you notice, if I notice how I feel right afterwards, I'm like, I feel either apathetic or bored or my anxiety has spiked, or I feel kind of inadequate and sort of yucky about myself. Like, I want to buy something. Like, none of those are good feelings that I wanted. But if you're not present and you don't notice them, then you just act on those urges. You know, I'm kind of buying something because I feel inadequate.

I know. So consuming is what I'm hearing is one of the worst things we can do, especially if you're an anxious person.

Yeah. And again, I think it kind of matters the kind of person you are. Like, I have a very nerdy husband who's a philosopher and he can look at the stats and just not get wound up in it, you know, and so for him it's okay. But, you know, we've had to work on kind of exactly what you're saying is that he'll tell me. And I'm like, my chest is pounding. Like, I'm not be able to sleep. And it's like you kind of have to. This is, I think an important thing for friendships and relationships is like, different people are at different points with this and you gotta kind of regulate depending on who you're talking to and what they. Yeah, I mean, there's probably some friends that you want the opposite. You know, I have other friends who are like, you know, not taking this Seriously. And not sheltering in place. And for them, I'm like, spring break.

Yeah, they're in Cancun with all their friends at the bars or whatever and saying, ah, who cares if I get it right? That's not the way you want to be either.

And that's a good way to think about emotions in general, is that. That they're functional. Like emotions have a purpose. Right. There's a purpose to. Why my chest freaks out when I see these statistics is like, I'm supposed to take action. I'm supposed to wash my hands, I'm supposed to socially distance. But once you're already taking action, the anxiety is not really helping. And the good news is we have tools to not get rid of it. Because let's be fair, this is an awful grieving, sad, yucky time. We're going to feel that stuff. But we can have some control over how much we feel it, when we feel it, when it's appropriate to feel it, and so on.

Yeah. And if we're seeking joy and happiness, you know, there's definitely times of our life where we may not feel that because of grief, because of loss, because of death, because of, you know, losing a career, losing a person close to you, breaking up in a relationship. There are grieving periods for sure, and this is one of them. And I think what I'm hearing you say is you can still find joy and not be exhausted all day long and useless as a human being. You can still find joy through just following through on a few of these things, which is getting out of self and what you're angry about and say, well, how can I be a solution by calling a friend, FaceTiming someone, showing up and doing something nice for someone. How can I, you know, work out? How can I get. Try to get some little bit extra sleep? How can I eat a little bit better? Just make a better decision, the next decision. And it's not easy, but it's worth it. If you want to be happy, it's the only things you can do to be happy, really.

Exactly. All of it reminds me of this wonderful parable. It comes from Buddhist tradition of the second arrow. And the way this parable works is Buddha is talking to students and he's asking his students and he says, if you get shot with an arrow on the street, is that really bad? And people say, yeah, that's super bad, getting shot with an arrow. And Buddha asks, okay, would it be worse if you were shot with a second arrow too? People like, yeah, second arrow would be worse. You Know, two times as bad as the first arrow. And so then Buddha goes on to explain, he's like, look, the bad stuff that happens in life is the first arrow. You know, we're living through a pandemic. That is a big arrow that we're getting hit with, but our reactions to it is the second arrow. Right. You know, it is. You know, we might lose loved ones, we might be trapped in the house, we might, you know, my Yale students, for example, the seniors aren't going to have graduation. They've lost all their weeks of party with their friends, they're in mourning. But to like, not eat healthy or not exercise or fight with your spouse or, you know, cry in your covers all the time. Like, in some ways, that second part is on you. You know, you might not be able to control COVID 19, but you can control, you know, how much sleep you get tonight or what you, you know, again, the, the best choices you make. And, you know, sometimes we're going to stab ourselves with those second arrows, but the idea is to reduce them as much as possible. A lot of those are in our control.

Yeah, I mean, disaster is inevitable. You know, pain is inevitable, bad things are going to happen. But it's a greater disaster to respond in a negative way, to fall down and pity yourself and hurt yourself more. That's the greater disaster, is what I'm hearing you say.

That's right. That's right. And again, you know, within reason, because I always like to put in, you know, like with a little self compassion.

Right.

Because there are going to be the icy, there are the ice cream Netflix days, you know, like.

I get it.

Yeah.

But it's the consistency of it. Every day after day, you're in control of. Here's a question, because I want to make sure that I'm very careful when I talk about control and mental health and mental illness and mental challenges, depression, anxiety. You know, there's different doctors and research that'll say, like, you can cure depression, mental health, like you have tools that you can apply. And then there's other people that will say, no, this is a chemical imbalance, that this is who I am, I can't be fixed. I need medication for the rest of my life. Where are you at with this in terms of mental health and depression, anxiety, the spectrum of it? You know, I feel like I went through more depression type thoughts and anxiety and suicidal thoughts when I was a lot younger. And now over time with practice, with improving myself every single day and going through challenges, I feel like I don't have those thoughts anymore. But I always thought something was wrong with me. What's your opinion on this? On, is there a spectrum for mental illness and mental health? Can you improve your ability to be less mentally ill or depressed? Or is this something we are born with and it's chemically unable to change?

Yeah, I think, I mean, it's worth remembering that there is a spectrum of this stuff and the kinds of interventions you want to take at different points in that spectrum might look different. And so the analogy I always use is with health stuff. So imagine you come in, I'm a doctor, and you come into my office and you say, hey, doctor, I have high blood pressure. You know, I'm a little overweight. I'd be like, you need to hit the treadmill. Hit the treadmill every day for half hour. But if you walk into my office and you're like clutching your heart and you're like, I'm in acute cardiac arrest, doctor, what do I do? I'm not gonna say, hey, get on the treadmill because like, you need to hop on the treadmill today, right? Like you need something different. And I think, you know, if your listeners are feeling like acutely suicidal, you know, like you're in the midst of a panic attack, I'm not gonna say, hey, you know, write a little gratitude, you know, list right now. Like, you're gonna need a different kind of care. You're gonna need something that deals with something much. I think medications in those cases, professional therapy, those are tools we know empirically tend to work. And there's lots of individual differences of who it works better for and so on. But those are tools that are there for acute cases. I think if you're just kind of feeling like, I'm a little depressed and I'm not flourishing right now, or I'm feeling really anxious in the current situation. That's when you're in the kind of crisis where a lot of these long term tools can really help, these tools that build on themselves over time. So that kind of just like in the exact way you were sharing with your story, where it's like you start with baby steps and then these things become habits that you're doing all the time that are protecting your mental health.

What's the difference between mental health and happiness?

I think it kind of depends on your definition. I mean, I think, you know, mental health is all the things that kind of go into whether we're feeling happy, whether we're feeling flourishing, whether we're experiencing positive emotion and so on. I think there's a lot of fight about these different definitions, but we kind of know it. You know, like you both want to be mentally healthy and happy and there's some overlap, there might be some nuance around the edges, but, you know, mostly they're good things to shoot for.

Yeah. And you talk about this in your class about rewirements. Is it possible for us to actually change who we are and rewire our minds, our thoughts and our level of happiness? Or is this.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the answer to that is like, yes, but not maybe in the way you think. Right. It's possible to rewire our habits just like it's possible to like, become healthier in terms of our physical fitness or lose a bunch of weight or something like that. Right. You can do it, but it's not like you go to the gym once and then you're good and then you pack up your gym bag and that's it. You actually have to put in constant effort. And so the research suggests that it's for sure possible to change your levels of happiness. Every single one of your listeners could achieve higher levels of statistical well being. It's not going to be perfect all the time. It's not going to change, but everybody can get better. But to do that, it takes work. You know, it takes like, you know, sleep and exercise every day. It takes being social even when you don't feel like it. It takes being other oriented when you're kind of in selfish mode. Like, you have to do those habits over time. The good news is as you do them more and more, and I think as you see the benefits, kind of like as you said in your own story, it becomes a little easier to do it, both because it's kind of like a habit that you're used to, but also you've seen the rewards. So when you're kind of not feeling it, you're like, okay, I'm really craving this ice cream right now. But like, you know, maybe it's better for me to just like, you know, hit my yoga mat instead. Right. So kind of know a little bit what's going to work better.

I'm curious. As a professor and with someone who's got all this spotlight on them right now and all these people are taking in your class at school and around the world, podcast is blowing up all these things. I'm sure the book deals are in the works and all this stuff are happening. Do you ever feel like an imposter? And I don't want to say this to like, in a Negative way. But I felt this way over my career, different times. Like, man, I'm saying these things, but am I living up to them at the highest level for myself? Is there ever moments where you feel like, gosh, I'm teaching this, but I'm just, I'm not happy with myself and what I'm teaching because I know I'm not living up to it fully, like, sometimes. But is there anything like that for you?

I mean, are there ever moments where I'm not. I mean, I think that's the real question. I mean, no, I think one of the challenging things about this work is that just knowing the science doesn't change my intuitions, right? Like I know all the things I'm supposed to be doing, but that doesn't instantly mean that I'm doing them. In class we talk about this other fallacy that kind of gets back to 80s culture. It's called the GI Joe fallacy. If you know GI Joe, GI Joe is this 80s cartoon. Army dudes had this famous saying at the end that like, knowing is half the battle. Go GI Joe and stuff, if you remember. But it turns out that this idea that knowing is half the battle is a fallacy. Like we think once I know what I'm supposed to do, you know, I read this management book, I read the self help book, now I know what I'm supposed to do. That is not, it's not half the battle. It's probably like not even 10% of the battle. It's most of the battle is putting it into effect in your own life. And so there are lots of times when I slack off and I'm not putting it into effect in my own life. I'm acutely aware of what I acutely aware of what I'm supposed to do. I acutely know what I'm supposed to do, but I'm aware that I'm not doing it. And I think honestly that's one of the reasons people like the class and the podcast is that they see that I'm kind of a screw up too. Like I'm an honest indication that like this stuff takes work and we're not going to be perfect and it takes baby steps and that's what you need to kind of feel better.

I mean, it seems pretty common knowledge that most of the world knows that you shouldn't be eating bad food if you want to lose weight. And yet we know, it's like you said, we know the knowledge, like eat less and you'll probably lose weight and feel a little better. Don't eat the sugar all day long and you're probably going to feel better. It's most people know this information, but we don't put it into action. Is it just because it's hard? Is it because we don't care enough about the desired result? Is it because there's a disconnect? Why is that?

Yeah, I think part of it's hard. Part of it actually is an accident of neuroscience that I'm totally fascinated with. This accident of how our brains are hooked up. So it turns out that there are different circuits in the brain for wanting something. Like the craving that you get and like the amount that you want to go after something and really actually liking something, like how much you enjoy it when you actually do it. Super weird that the brain doesn't line those up, but they don't. The biggest case where you see that is in the case of addiction. So people who are heroin addicts, for example, incredibly crave the drug. You know, they're gonna steal from their family or do whatever, but then when they actually get it, they're really habituated to the drug. So they don't actually even enjoy it that much when they get it. Like, these circuits have totally dissociated. I think this is what happens with all this stuff. You know, I will, you know, crave a sugary meal or crave sitting on my butt watching Netflix or, you know, crave money or something like that. But those cravings don't map onto the liking. And then there's the flip side. There's stuff that I'll really like, like, you know, doing nice things for others or like, really pushing myself at the gym or getting to bed really early, putting down the social media. Like, those are not things that I crave at all, but they're things that my body and my mind are really gonna like. And it's so stupid that the brain is wired up in this dumb way that they don't align up. But that's. That's the problem.

I mean, how do we change the craving then?

So one part is just awareness, right? And so. And you kind of talked about this just even in your own life, right? It's to kind of force the noticing and be present with the liking, right? So when I panic scroll on social media, I notice like, huh, Didn't. Did not like that so much. Hey, brain, let's remember, didn't like that so much. You know, when you do something nice for someone else, you're like, actually this felt super good. You know, with exercise, I get this A lot. I feel like I'm slowly rewiring my craving for things like yoga and hard exercise where it's like, I really try. I had this wonderful yoga teacher for a while who at the end of a really hard practice would say, take a moment to notice what your body feels like after you just did that. Do you like that feeling? And again, it's sort of starting to rewire. Like, actually, I do like that feeling. I'm gonna try to go after that. Yeah.

Okay. So, you know, this is kind of my brand of advice. It's gotta be incredibly stupid on the surface.

Yeah.

It's gotta be so simple. It's really implausible that it works. And once you start unpacking it, it has to have a crazy bananas amount of scientific proof and real life proof in people's lives to prove why it works. So I'll tell you the story first, behind the high five habit. Because I did not set out and go like, okay, I've written the five second rulebook. I need to come up with another five. I have been toiling away with what book to write for nearly five years. So it's been five years since I've had a book in print. And I had this random morning where there's a lot going on in my life. I'm not going to get into it because it's a boring story, but I was just having a really hard time in my life and I woke up, got out of bed, I made my bed like I always do. I walked into the bathroom, I'm standing there brushing my teeth, and I catch my reflection in the mirror. And my first thought is, God, you look like hell. Seriously. And I know women in particular can relate to this, but what a lot of people don't realize is you guys are incredibly hard on yourselves too. And so as I go, God, you look like hell, I start then cataloging all of the things that are wrong with my appearance. I'm like, your gray hair is coming in, you've got stripes on your neck, one of your boobs is lower than the other. You know, you look exhausted. And then as soon as you have a negative thought or a self criticism, it's sort of like lint in a dryer. Once you start collecting it, it just keeps on collecting it. So now I'm thinking not about how horrible I look or how tired I look now, I start thinking about all the stuff I need to do. I start going, oh my gosh, I got up a little too late and I've got a zoom call. In eight minutes. I don't even have a bra on yet. The dog needs to be walked. And I could feel my energy going down. Like, I just felt the weight of the world on my shoulders. Overwhelmed, uncertain. You know, it doesn't even matter what was going on in my life at that time, because I think it's a universal feeling to feel overwhelmed by your life at times.

Yes.

And so here I am, a motivational speaker. Speaker. Unmotivated, Unmotivated, Uncaffeinated, no bra, standing there in my underwear with my dog at my feet. I don't know what came over me, but as cheesy as it sounds, I just raised my hand and gave the tired, haggard woman in the mirror a high five. And it didn't change my life, like, right then and there. But something shifted. Like, I felt a little lighter. I felt like I wasn't alone. I felt like, okay, you know, this moment in your life is hard, but you can do this, Mel. And I went on with my day. So the second day, I woke up, and this is when things started to really kind of churn in my mind. The first thing that I noticed was this. So I wake up Louis, and I make my bed, and I realized I was looking forward to that moment in the mirror where I was gonna see myself. Now, look, I'm 52 years old. I will probably have a hot flash during the middle of this interview. I'm a lot older than you.

Just don't eat lobster.

Oh, yeah, I know. I had a really allergic reaction the last time we were together.

Wow.

But I have spent the first 45 years of my life either criticizing the woman in the mirror or ignoring her. And this was the first time that I could remember that I was actually looking forward to seeing myself. Sort of like, you know, when I was coming here today. You and I are very good friends. As I was walking into the building, I'm feeling excited to see you. And it wasn't like I was feeling excited to see myself. Like, I'm not like, yeah, because I got a lot of crap going on in my life, but I felt a little bit like I'm about to see a friend. And so that second morning, I high five myself again. And again, I feel something shift. I feel a little. Just a little lightness in the mood, and I go on with my day. So the third morning, I do it again and again, like, lightness. And so I keep doing it, keep doing it. A couple weeks go by, and now I'm starting to feel a little bit of momentum, and I'M really enjoying. I have no idea what the hell is going on. I haven't even done this in front of my husband Chris yet. Because let's be honest, standing in front.

Of a mirror, high fiving yourself.

Yeah, like, come on, how pathetic does it get? Like, it's really is. You're like that bad. So I snap a photo of myself. I've got my retainer in, I got bedhead. Like, I'm not looking, looking glamorous. I did not expect this to be the photo that would ignite a movement. And within an hour, I posted on my story on Instagram. Within an hour, at least 100 people tagged me all over the world. People high fiving the mirror with their kids. People on a submarine high fiving it in the military. People mma. Like, just. And I thought, okay, wait a minute. Maybe I'm not the only one that needs a little boost in the morning. Maybe I'm not the the only one who feels alone. Maybe I'm not the only one that is missing a sense of encouragement and control and confidence in an overwhelming moment in my life. Maybe there's something here. And then the messages started to come in. Whoa, Mel. Like, I have been using this for five days. This woman wrote to us, Louis. She's had body dysmorphia for 20 years, has not been able to look at herself in the mirror. Five days of doing this high five. And she said, I can look at myself and I even see beyond the body. I see the person and I can grin. We had a woman who wrote to us who said that she was in a domestic violence shelter. She had escaped a very abusive relationship. She had seen me talking at our friend Jamie Kerm Lima's event. She started doing the hotel high five thing. She DMs us and she says that, you know, I have childhood trauma. I've just been in a physically abusive relationship. I've lost everything. I'm in a domestic violence shelter. What this high five in the mirror is teaching me is that I still have myself. And so that was when I said, I got to figure out what's going on. And I started to unpack the research and the research around this simple. Rich, I love that you called it a ritual, because I want people to habit stack this with brushing their teeth. This is so life changing. It's so simple. The science here is like, you can't believe it. And once I unpack it, you're gonna be like, I can't believe how cool this thing is.

So what's the science say?

Okay, so the science. Let's start with the first thing. So the first thing is that when you first try it, okay, you will not be able to raise your hand and high five yourself and be like, you suck, Mel, or today's gonna be terrible. And there's a reason for that. And the reason is that for your entire life, you have given other people high fives. So when you give a high five or you receive one, what is a high five? Just the. The gesture alone. What is. What does this communicate? If we do this to each other.

Nice job. Good work. You're doing amazing. Yeah. Keep it up.

Yeah.

I believe in you. I love you. Let's go. If you blow a shot, you got to get back in the game. A high fives, like, shake it off. You can win. And so all of that lifetime of high fiving other people and the messaging associated with it is programmed right here in your subconscious brain. There's a field of study called neurobics, which is about neurobics. I know. I didn't make that up.

Interesting.

It's interesting. Physical movement plus new neurological activity. When you marry an unexpected physical movement with new neurological activity, it's the fastest way to forge new neural pathways in your brain. Okay, we know the example. You've covered this on your show of brushing with the wrong hand and thinking positive thoughts. And the reason why the that works is because when you're brushing with the wrong hand, it's unexpected. Your brain doesn't expect it. So instead of drifting off about the fact that you need to walk the dog, you have to focus. So your prefrontal cortex is engaged. You're not used to high fiving your own reflection, so it's an unexpected physical movement that then activates all of the positive programming in your subconscious. So when you raise your hand and you high five your tired self, Louis, what happens is all of the messaging with this, the high five. I believe in you. I love you. I celebrate you. You got this. Keep going. Come on. It actually fuses with your freaking reflection. It's impossible to criticize yourself. Your brain won't allow it because it's not wired that way when you're making that motion.

Right?

Isn't that crazy?

Hard to say you suck. You don't matter at anything. It's hard.

You can. You can't. And so this lifetime of positive subconscious programming associated with high fiving other people gets fused with your own reflection in this ritual. That's just the beginning. Okay. That's just the beginning. The second thing that starts to happen. That's really interesting. So, you know, we've had a ton of people do this, obviously around the world. Super easy idea. It's spreading around the world. We start interviewing people about what's going on. And, and this is what we notice. We notice that one of two things happen when you first try this. So here's how I want everybody to try it. You're going to go into the bathroom and do it before or after you brush your teeth. And that's important because I want you to make this a ritual that's part of your morning routine. And so we need to stack it with something you already do. And you're going to stand there for a minute, and I want you to look at yourself. Now that right alone, most of us don't do. Look at yourself. And I want you to just think about the day ahead. This is based on more research. So recent studies show from the University of Florida, that if you take just a minute and you set an intention about how the day is going to go, about who you're going to be, how you're going to show up, what's the one thing that kind of matters to you to really make a difference, to make progress on. If you just kind of set that intention, who am I going to be today? How am I going to show up today? Even if it's a hard day, how are you going to show up? And then you raise your hand and you seal it. Research shows just setting the intention alone changes your mood. It boosts your productivity, it increases your ability to make an impact on other people. And so when you seal it with this high five, it becomes this ritual of setting an intention for the day and also silencing the criticism and reprogramming the default setting about how you see yourself, whether or not you believe in yourself. And you leave that bathroom feeling like the wind is at your back now, when people do this for the first time. So you're going to stand there tomorrow and you're going to go, okay, Mel Robinson Lewis, brush my teeth. Okay, this is stupid. You're going to just start rejecting it. I guarantee you this is the coolest stuff you're gonna have the biggest resistance to. And so for those of you that just raise your hand and do it, you're gonna immediately be like, why have I not been doing this? It feels good to be encouraged and.

Supported to high vibe yourself.

Yes. Why have I not had my own back? Why do I stand here and criticize myself? Why do I allow this moment every single morning to Be a moment. Moment where life takes over and I drift into autopilot. Why am I not taking this moment for me to build a partnership with myself? The second group of people, and this is the larger group, resisted. And this is really interesting. And the reason why you resist it and the reason why it feels weird is because you believe leave. You're not worthy of support or celebration.

From yourself or from others, period.

Wow.

Why do we think we're not worthy of celebration?

Well, for people that grew up in chaotic, violent or whatever household, it was your lived experience. I think that for many of us, we look back on our lives and, you know, the cognitive negative bias has its focus on the things that went wrong. And so you begin to tell yourself a story about your life that is basically a pyramid of all the things that you regret, of all the things that you wish had done over, of all the things that you don't like about yourself. And so you drag that with you into the bathroom every morning, and you stare at the mirror and you see somebody that has screwed up. You see somebody who's not wearing you're meant to be. You see somebody who doesn't have the number on the scale or the car that you wanted or the job that you had hoped for or the relationship that you had always dreamed about. And so standing there, you believe you're not worthy of support or celebration. And it's this deep belief. You know, we talk a lot in the personal development space of, oh, I'm not good enough. I actually think that's the polite thing that people say. I believe that people have a much, much more horrible way of talking to, like, what? I can't say it on tv, but I can say it on the Internet. I'm a piece of. Yeah, I'm worthless. No one will ever love me. I screwed up my life. I'm a failure. I'll never amount to anything. It's too late. I'm a bad person. Like, I think people actually say this to themselves.

Yeah.

And they say it over and over again.

Yes, yes, yes. And just like ruts on a dirt road, it starts to wear in your brain, and it becomes the familiar path. And so you stand in front of the mirror and, you know, I'm telling you, raise your hand and let all that positive programming you've given to everybody else. We are amazing at celebrating everybody else. We cheer for our favorite sports teams. We buy tickets to, you know, our favorite musicians. We throw birthday parties for people. We take on extra work for our colleagues. We help our family members out and our friends out. But when it comes to supporting ourselves, we don't know how to do it. In fact, there's a lot of people that think it's selfish to put yourself first or that you're arrogant. If you're due, I'm here to tell you it is essential to your well being, to your fulfillment, to your happiness, all of it. So if you're feeling resistance, you're either going to feel it because you already have a deep story, that you don't deserve it because of your track record, your past, because of what's happening in your life, or you're going to feel resistance because you have been trained to believe that you only deserve that kind of stuff when you're winning. Like, if I don't have that car, I don't get the high five. If I didn't get that promotion, I didn't deserve it. If I am not in a loving relationship, I don't deserve to be celebrated because I'm not actually achieving or doing the things that warrant that. I'm here to tell you I'm on a mission to make every human being realize that if you wake up in the morning and you're breathing and you're standing in front of that mirror and you have survived the stuff you have survived and you are still waking up and trying to do better, you not only deserve a high five, you need it. Because what we also know based on the research, is that empowerment, support, kindness, love, celebration, it is the single most motivating force on the planet. Tough love is a bunch of baloney. What really fuels people, particularly, particularly when you're going through a challenge, is feeling celebrated, seen and supported. And the research bears it out.

Yeah, I can think of the times when I was with on sports teams where I had great, loving, encouraging coaches. It made me want to work harder from a more energized place, an abundant energy. But when I had the coaches that would just degrade you and put you down and call you names in front of your teammates and make you feel bad, it would drive me to try, try to be better. But it was always like harder. And I never felt satisfied, I never felt fulfilled. I always felt like even when I accomplished something, it still wasn't good enough. And then I repeat that pattern like, okay, I'm gonna accomplish, but it's not enough to feel loved. And so let me keep accomplishing in order to feel love. But I still don't love myself because it's not good enough. So let me go for the next thing.

Yeah, exactly.

It's funny because I have a photo on my phone that my. My therapist told me to do this exercise, like, eight months ago, which was a strategy for me to reclaim the love for myself. So I have a photo of my childhood self. I don't know if people can see this on YouTube. I know you are, but a photo of me, this is probably when I was, like, five or six. Maybe I was seven. But something that I've tried to do and really been integrating my life is to reconnect with. With the child where I felt like I stopped loving myself.

Okay, so let's talk about this right now. You ready? So let me talk about this image. So let's talk about the Lewis this age standing in front of a mirror.

Yeah.

And what I do is I stand in front of myself as a child. I imagine myself. But to do it. Imagine looking at the mirror as yourself.

Yes.

Yeah.

Well, what I'm trying to say is, when you were this age and you stood in front of the mirror, you had a totally different relationship with yourself because you still loved yourself.

Yeah.

You still thought that you were a great kid, and you wanted all the things that the adult Lewis wants.

Right.

You want to feel loved, you want to feel seen, you want to feel heard. You want to feel like you matter. And you, in seeing yourself when you were this age, felt those things for yourself.

Yeah, absolutely. And somewhere along the way, you lost it.

And so what I'm trying to say is that when you stand in front of this mirror, exactly what Lewis is talking about. When you've got coaches that scream at you and degrade you, and sure, it makes you run faster, but it leaves its mark.

It does.

It leaves its mark. And so there's research. So let me talk about why this is so motivating, particularly because so many of your audience love sports. Right. So they did a study where they looked at NBA teams and. And what they wanted to take a look at was, does fist bumps, backpack, some high fives make a difference in a team winning touch? Right.

Didn't they do, like a 2020 special or something?

I don't know, but if they did, I need to watch it.

Yeah, yeah, but.

So, like, the power of touch, but I think it's deeper. It's the power of encouragement. And so what they found is that in the study, at least in the years that they looked at, you could take a look at the teams that made it to the championship in the NBA, go all the way back to the preseason, and those were the teams that had the most Number of fist bumps and back pats and high fives. Yep. And the same was true about the teams that were the lowest in the league at the end of the season. They had the least amount of fist bumps, high fives, and touch.

Why they're least encouraging.

Correct. Those sorts of gestures build trust and partnership. I'm telling you, you. When you stand in front of a mirror and ignore yourself, you're like the losing NBA team.

Interesting.

Selfish on your own, isolated. You're not in partnership with the person you're staring at in the mirror. You don't have your own back because you're ignoring yourself.

Yes.

There's another study, and this one is, I think, even more powerful. So they did this study where they wanted to know what's the most motivating thing to help somebody get through a really big challenge? They divide, the researchers divide kids into three groups, right? And they gave each of the groups of kids very challenging problems to work through. And they wanted to measure, okay, how resilient, how long would they work, what were their attitudes like? And then they measured it based on, well, what form of praise or support are we going to give each one of these groups? And let's see, what's the most empowering? First group gets what we know to be the fixed mindset stuff. The praise was all verbal praise, and it was simply about a trait. Louis, you are so smart. Louis, you know, you are a super student praising something that is just sort of a compliment about you. The second group of students working on a challenging problem got praise based on work ethics. So something in their control. Oh, look, Louis, you're working so hard. Louis, you got such good perseverance. Louis, you know, you're really, like, just grinding away over there. Good job. Those guys did better than Louis, you're smart, Louis. Hardworking better. The third group, the researcher simply walked up, did not say a word, and high fived the kid.

Really?

That's it? That's it. That group, literally exponentially more motivated, worked longer, worked through more challenging problems. Now, here's the big question.

Why?

Why would a simple high five with no verbal praise be more empowering and motivating and inspiring and develop more resilience and confidence and motivation inside somebody? And the reason why is this. A high five affirms your deepest fundamental needs. It's not just a gesture. When you high five somebody, particularly somebody who has either blown the free throw shot or is working on something difficult or going through a really hard time, when you high five them, you're saying, I see you when you high five them during a challenge, you actually are acknowledging. I know this is hard. So the person feels heard. And because it's one to one, and you have to be really intentional. Like, if you and I go to high five, like, we have to focus on it. That was a good one. If you miss it, what do you do?

You gotta do it again.

Correct. So there's an intentionality behind it, and that makes you feel like you're being affirmed as a unique individual.

Interesting.

And so all of those things are in that one gesture. Now it goes even more. So there's even more here. So I was talking to our buddy, Dr. Daniel. Amen. Right. And so. So one of the world's leading experts on brains, he's got like 60,000 brain scans.

I think it's like 120,000.

Oh, is it at this point, crazy?

Yeah.

So he was so excited about the high five habit, he completely geeked out. He's like, oh, my gosh. Yes, yes, yes. He's like, yes. Neurobics. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. So we. Then he said, let me tell you what else is going on, Mel. And I'm like, really? There's more? He said, yeah. He said, you know how when you do it, you said you felt like a little kind of boost in your mood? He said, well, there are two things going on there. He said, first of all, when you cross a finish line in a race, what do you do?

Put your hands up.

Yeah. What do you do when your favorite team sports.

Yeah.

You high five somebody. What do you do at a musical concert?

Yay.

What do you do? You're raising your hand in celebration when you high five somebody or fist bump them or put your arm around them. That raised arm gesture, in a positive sense, triggers your nervous system to tingle with celebration. It's the energy of celebration, even if you're going through something difficult. And even more, you get a dopamine drip when you do this. And so part of the reason why you feel this kind of shift in your mood and you feel a little bit of like, oh, okay, I can do. I can face this. I can do this. I got this. Is because of the dopamine. It's because of the nervous system, and it's because of all of this positive programming associated with that gesture.

Their issue is autonomy. So people were feeling like, I am losing control over my life, and that's why I'm upset. Not that this is always bad, but it's that I'm doing this more than I should. I'm doing this more than is useful. I'm doing this as more than is healthy. I'm doing this to the exclusion of things that I know are much more meaningful. I feel manipulated.