How To Always Perform At Your Best with Dr. Izzy Justice

Every higher human experience and every higher human ability seems to be happening around 10 Hz because your sensory input is amplified and your cognitive functionality— you're just, without thinking, you're saying the right thing, you're being funny at the right moment, you're crying at the right moment, you're thoughtful at the right moment, you're critical at the right moment.

Dr. Izzy, welcome to The Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books podcast. I'm excited to chat with you about your book today. And my first question comes from your introduction. You say, quote, your best choice and your worst choice are rarely separated by values and skills and almost entirely by the crowd noise in your brain over those choices. Tell us a little bit about who you are and why you decided to kick off the book with that quote.

Yeah, well, first of all, Nick, thank you so much for, for having me. I'm just delighted to share knowledge that honestly I have discovered both through accident in large part and a series of, you know, mostly painful life experiences, having grown up in Africa and coming to the US as an immigrant student with almost no money and trying to find my place in this world. In many ways, I feel like my journey was this unplanned, you know, let's go to the next stop and see where it takes us and go to the next stop and see where it takes us. And to be truthful, Nick, if I hadn't run into the right people at many of these spots, I just wouldn't be here. So— You know, I am an amalgam of my professional work, of my personal life experiences, and just having learned from so many people along the way. And I feel privileged that I've lived long enough to kind of weave it all together. To your question, let me start with probably the easiest way to answer that question. So I have the privilege of working with a lot of professional athletes, head coaches, teams for decades now. And at the professional level, so these are athletes that play their sport for a living, you know, it's less than 1% of athletes out there. So think of all of the athletes that play college football. I mean, there might be 2 players, if that, on any given team. around the country that go to the NFL. Same thing with basketball. It's a very, very small number. The point I'm trying to make is that at that highest level, you can pick any sport. You know, the difference between the 100th-ranked player and maybe the 5th-ranked player is negligible. Maybe in the difference between the 100th-ranked player and the number 1 and the number 2 player. might be quite dramatic. You can pick any sport— tennis, soccer, golf. I work with a lot of golfers. So when I make the claim that the difference between your best and your worst is mostly the noise in your head and not skill, is I find that the difference between the 5th player in the world— and this is real— and the 100th player in the world, and in many cases the 5th player in the world and the 250th player in the world, is not skill. So I'll take golf as an example because I work with a lot of golfers, and it's an individual sport. So in a way, that makes this point better because it's not based on what your teammate does. Your wins and losses aren't based on what your teammate does. Golf is very individual. And there are sort of 3 layers of, of the professional golf. There's the PGA Tour, there's the next tier, you know, like a minor league called the Korn Ferry Tour, and there's one below that called the America's Tour, and I work with all of them. And the guy that's on the, on the lowest league honestly has all the shots, all the physical ability, all the— I mean, name it— the equipment that the guys at the very top tour left. And if you would actually physically look at them, the only difference that I see is the number of logos that they have on their shirt and, and, and, and on their golf bag. But they have the shot. And when I measure their brains, which is what I do for a living, I find consistently that, you know, most of the guys at the lower level, the electricity in the brain, which is noise, which is what I measure, is a lot higher. And so the guy who's 250th in the world, when he's over a golf shot, is thinking, I better make this. You know, I, I, I need to finish high to, to, to make money. I gotta pay bills. Like, my sponsor is, is looking at me. The guy that's number 4 or 5 in the world is not thinking those things. He's thinking, oh, there's the tree. I'm gonna hit the ball starting at the tree. I'm gonna cut it over there and, and, and do that. And so I understand that part of it comes with, with the territory. The guys at the top get paid more. They have more resources and, and Coaches of all kinds. And I wish I could convince every lower-tier professional athlete, like, dude, you have it. If you lower the noise in your head and just in that moment when you're over the ball— and that's literally and also a metaphor— if you get your brain down to that calm state and allow your physical ability to come out, And then my last comment is, to that question, is as a sports neuroscientist and a performance coach, when my text messages blow up, when my athletes call me because they're mad about something, it is rarely, get this, Nick, it is rarely because they lost.

Hmm.

It is almost always because they underperformed. They, they had the shot, they knew what to do, but in that moment they didn't. They didn't bring out— they're not mad that they lost, and they're not mad they didn't do something miraculous. They're mad because they didn't do what they were capable of, what they were— what they've done 100 times in practice and in other tournaments or, or events.

I love that introduction. I think it paints a very clear picture of what you do. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got there? I found the history of your work in this 30 years of experience pretty interesting, starting in physics, and then how did you end up in neuroscience?

Yeah, yeah. Well, again, it's such a long story. I'll really try to give you the Cliff Notes version of it. But, you know, I think it started with being the 6th out of 7 children. I was way down, way, way down on the totem pole. And in my household, I mean, there were 9 of us, 7 kids, mom, dad, 9 of us. And we— I don't know exactly, but I kid you not, I don't think our home was more than 1,000 square feet. It was very, very small. And so, you know, during the day, in the evenings, on weekends, when we had dinner as a family or talked as a family, I never had a voice. I mean, I had 3 older brothers and 2 older sisters, a mom and a dad, and I would open my mouth and it would get drowned out. And so I think just by default, I turned into an observer of the human experience in my own house growing up.

Hmm.

And so I— when you're an observer, you have high-quality monologues because your curiosity is saying, Oh, why did he say that? And, and, and, oh, why did that happen? And again, growing up in Africa was not the best of life experiences, both living there, but also just family dynamics were not healthy. And so I think this exploration of how do I make sense of this? You know, how do I make sense of the malaise that I was experiencing in my household and where I lived. And for whatever reason, whatever was presented to me just wasn't enough. I always just found something inadequate about it. And one example is, you know, people of a certain faith who would say, hey, you know, we had the right answer and those people aren't going to go to heaven because they believe in a, in a different God. And yet they were our friends. We had lunches with them, dinners with them, but they're not going to go to heaven because they believe in something different. And that didn't make sense to me. It made more sense that, you know, God just wants you to be good and whatever you think of God is. And certainly at the moment that he's going to decide where you go, he'll take into— or she will take into account, you know, Irrespective of what the compass said, you traveled the right journey. So I have a hard time believing that good people don't deserve good things to happen for them. So it started there. And then, you know, my initial degree, what you're right, was in physics, which is the study of motion and forces and electricity. And I don't know that I had a passion for it, Nick, to be honest with you. But I wanted to be an engineer. And so after that, I got an engineering degree, which was more sort of really understanding what makes things move. Why are things the way they are, but matter? You know, what makes a car move and stop? You know, and if I push something, why does something drop? Why does electricity, you know, go this way? And how far can it go? What is— how does light impact all these things? Literally none, that the human brain had electricity and the human body through its neuromuscular movement is motion. Like just moving your hand up in a gesture is a movement. Or if I want to throw something, I mean, the whole idea of a target sport, you know, throwing a basketball or throwing a soccer or kicking a soccer ball or whatever sport. You know, I— there's a motor movement primarily to create force to send the ball to a destination, a target, a goal, or a hole. And now tying it all back, you know, when I learned that the brain has electricity, you can imagine my shock. Like, I actually really did not know that, I would say, for the first, I don't know, 30 years of my life. I did not know that. And by the way, not only does the brain have electricity, it's the same electricity as the light bulb or the electricity that's powering this podcast. Literally, it's cycles per second. It's movement that creates energy, if you would. And not only is it the same electricity, but if you think about this, Nick, For us as human beings, it has to be electricity. It couldn't possibly be something else. In other words, it couldn't be light because light cannot travel through opaque objects. So how is light going to go from your brain to your knee or your foot if you want to kick something? Because it's got to go through bones and muscles and tissue and blood. It can't be osmosis, you know, because it's too slow. It can't be gravity because it's too slow. So whoever designed us, it is an unbelievable design that we have electricity because of speed. So if I'm walking, Nick, and about 10 feet in front of me I see a black object moving— think about this, Nick, just, just process this, which is, you know, a scenario that all of us could, could, you know, have. Visual input of that object has got to go through my eyes to my brain. I have to label that. That's a snake, not a stick. How do I know it's a snake? Because it's moving and it's sort of S-ing its way across, and I know from past inventory that that's a snake. But then even going further, my brain has to say it's not just a snake, an animal, it's a dangerous animal. So there's a danger now, there's this threat. And not just that, but it's slow and it slithers. I need to turn and run, so I need to turn 180 and run as fast as I can that way, the other way, as opposed to running at it and jumping over it like if it was a turtle. So all of that is happening in what, I mean, 2 seconds? But what other mechanism can enable all of that sensory input, all of that cognitive deduction And then create a motor movement that's just perfect. And the same thing applies to like right now I see you, you're sitting, but let's say if suddenly behind your right shoulder something's— you feel like a bite, like something is stinging you. All right, so you just did it. You literally took your left hand. Why didn't you take your right hand?

Less effective? Less— I don't know.

Yes. But, but you didn't think that, right? Your body did, by the way. So for those of us— of you that, that didn't see that, he literally took his left hand because it makes so much sense, because you can get to your right shoulder through your left hand. And not only will you get to the— you'll find the exact location without any GPS of exactly where the sting bite is, and you'll scratch it or itch it until the, until the, the, the sting goes away or it feels comfortable. and then you put your hand back. Like, without your eyes even finding that space, you got to the location, you interpret that as a danger, and you healed yourself. So we need our thoughts to be fast. And now to put everything together, what started off in my childhood as a lot of monologue and trying to make sense of the world, to doing something that I really didn't have a passion for, and then I run into that you know, oh my gosh, really the way to understand the human experience is to understand how the brain works. And the gas of the brain, like what the, the language of the brain quite literally is electricity.

Hmm. I think that's a beautiful example to explain what we're talking about here. And you're great with metaphors. There's another one in the book that I really enjoyed, which I'd love to have you expand on a little bit because I think it It also does a great job explaining what you're trying to communicate in this book, and that's a cabin in the woods with a river that flows by and a trash bag. Could you tell everybody what that metaphor is?

Yeah, yeah. When I public speak, I think I use that almost all the time. But look, all of us are trying to be better versions of ourselves. All of us, unless you're super lucky, have some kind of a daily or a weekly challenge that we face. And many of them we interpret with our naked eyes. We see a behavior or, or something. So the analogy that I use is, is this approach. Imagine that you have a cabin, a beautiful cabin by a river, and everything about this place is just magical. You see the sky, the mountains, the river flowing. You can hear it. You know, deer come by in the morning and drink water. However, when you wake up in the morning, there's a bag of trash, like literally like a black bag of human trash that shows up and it somehow wedges itself in right in front of your cabin on this river. And you're like, no problem. You go over there with your cup of coffee or your favorite beverage, you pick it up and you put it in your trash can. And literally you enjoy the rest of your beautiful place and your human experience of that day, and you do that every day. Now, that is a solution to a problem. And so I would say, now wait a minute, isn't the better solution to go upstream and see where is this coming from every day to begin with? And let me stop it there so I don't have to do all this work on a daily basis. In that analogy, my argument is upstream of all of our human experience is the brain. And if we go up there and we study it and we understand it and we, you know, have better tools, we have to do less work downstream. And I don't use the word tragic very often, you know, I call myself a scientist, and— but I think it's tragic that most human beings around the world, historically and currently, in our education process, formal education and informal education. Formal education in school, middle school, high school, college. Informally from our parents and neighbors and elders and mentors and coaches. They teach and we learn so many things: history, geography, you know, math and civics and whatever. But somehow left out of our learning was our brain. Like the one thing we are going to use all the time forever. Like, why won't we talk about that? Why was there not a class on that? Like, how was that left out? And so part of my writing this book and the work that I do is I, I want to fill that void so that all of us can go upstream and all of us can stop that bag of trash, which is a metaphor for whatever it is that you face daily.

You've given some examples of how this relates to the sports world. So I'm lining up to take a putt and I'm overcome with emotion and my performance might suffer as a result. So what you help people do is get back to that 10 Hz, that calm state of mind, so they can operate, uh, at their best level. Is it too big of a jump to ask you about a different representation of that? Maybe we talk about Trauma. I mean, before we press record today, you were telling me that we understand trauma and we talk about trauma usually from a psychological or an experiential perspective, but not usually from a neuroscience perspective. So how can this metaphor of the trash bag and going upstream, how can that relate to something that most of us have experienced, which is some type of trauma?

Yeah.

That usually represents itself in big moments and causes us to lower our performance? Yeah.

So, again, I have worked extremely hard, 35 years, you know, and counting formally, and then 6 decades of life now. And I have learned that to make complex things simple is the magic. It's very easy to make the complex complex because it's complex. And so let me try and do it in the most simplistic way. What the brain does with every human experience subconsciously, immediately, is to give that experience context. Right?

Mm-hmm.

I have to understand, first of all, is this dangerous or is this safe? And my brain looks for those clues, right? And that dictates everything else. So right now, again, maybe this isn't a great thing, but, you know, if you and I were having coffee and we were having the same conversation and it's going really well, but then I reach out to the back of my pocket and I pull out some kind of a weapon, you'd be like, whoa, how can I get out of here as fast as possible? Context. I changed the context. You know, when I see a snake there, danger, context, right? So it's the brain's job to give every human experience context and understanding so that we can figure out how to respond to it. Now, with every experience, just, just follow me carefully. I'm trying to do that in as simple a way as possible. Your brain in an experience does not say, oh, Let me go to Google or to ChatGPT and let me scour the internet, the vast body of knowledge and information, and come up with the most objective understanding and label of this experience.

It'd be nice if it did, but you're right, it doesn't.

It'd be nice if it did. But you know what it does scour is the only inventory that it can scour, which is your experiences. So in a way, every human being is inherently biased. And that's a tough thing for us to swallow, but it's true because your context on every situation is based on the very limited experience of your life experience. It gets worse. So not— so that means out of the gate, the default factory setting of the human brain is biased. It gets worse. When we are faced with an experience, especially if it's on the danger and unsafe side, your brain does not inventory the collective you know, data points of that experience, it inventories the worst one, you know, because it wants to protect you. And so it is now even more biased.

Hmm.

So anytime that we face something challenging, whatever elements of that challenge trigger The most negative inventory of your brain, which is what psychologists call trauma. I, I'm not a psychologist. But what that then does, it spikes the human brain. It moves the electricity high because in order for the brain to do that and make you aware of that, think of all of the inventory that it is retrieving. That experience where you screwed up, where something bad happened, where you didn't know how to handle it, where people were not nice to you, where you had to struggle through something. These are all very high-frequency memories, engrams, that are being retrieved. And now the, the, the, the response, whether it's athletic or, or behavior or cognitive function, is limited. And so this is what psychologists call— again, I am not a psychologist— would say anxiety. Now, anxiety is not a thing. Stress is not a thing. And they are English words that are describing something, right? So there's no human part, there's no organ, there's no neuron, there's no gland that's called anxiety or stress. But I know what people mean by that. But what they're really trying to say is that your brain is spiking, the electricity has spiked in your brain, right? And your brain is essentially 3.5 pounds, caged in a skull. So it creates heat. And this is why, you know, people's palms get sweaty or we have goosebumps because the brain is trying to— the body is trying to essentially cool itself down. So go back to golf and the example that you gave. If I'm over a putt and my brain suddenly says, hey, the last one that you had that was just like this, You kind of missed it over here. Don't do that again. Now, that thought, which was subconscious, which is designed to protect you, has now robbed your— the sensory input of what you actually want to do.

Hmm.

And so we start to shake, maybe because the frequency is higher. Maybe our hands shake, or we do some kind of a reflex response. Like, I see guys doing this movement with their head, pretending they're looking at the target again, but they're really not looking. They're trying to bring that electricity down because they want to see where they want to kick the ball or hit the ball or throw the ball. So performance anxiety or stress, these are not— I prefer people to describe something that's far more objective. And I like people to understand, be able to give their thoughts a frequency. Okay, this is 80 Hz, this is 90 Hz, this is the magical 10 Hz. At 10 Hz, I'm I'm calm, I'm relaxed, I'm focused. It's a— having looked into brains, I don't know, 18,000+ times, I'm— a surprise finding is that, you know, that 10 Hz-ish, you know, plus or minus 2 or 3, but generally around there, human beings experience their best performance and their best experiences. Like every Higher human experience and higher human ability seems to be occurring at that frequency.

And I'd like to ask why in just a moment. First, I'd like to summarize a little bit of what we just talked about for the audience, and we can use the example of maybe public speaking. So oftentimes when I go to get on stage, my frequency spikes. And that's probably because in my entire history of stepping on stages and presenting in front of other people, for the most part, like objectively, if I was to average them, it's been a wonderful series of experiences. There are 2 or 3 times where I've stuttered or I've embarrassed myself, and my brain tends to default to those extreme experiences like you highlighted. It would be great if it said, hey, the average experience has been amazing. Your last 20 experiences have been amazing. But instead it goes to that most extreme experience. What that does from a physiology perspective is it spikes my hurts. Now, usually, and I'd like you to explain this, usually after the first minute or so, maybe even less, after the first 30 seconds of being on stage in front of hundreds of people, I get back down to what I would articulate as maybe about 10 Hz, where I feel calm, I feel in control, I'm confident. But that moment leading up to getting on stage and in the first moments, it spikes.

Yeah.

To a level that lowers my performance. Hands shake, you know, get a little bit sweaty. What's happening there?

Yeah. So again, going back to the trauma, In the minutes leading up to you going on stage, and, and I've been in those situations dozens and dozens of times, I understand literally what you're saying. Your brain is retrieving all of the inventory. So again, I'm a scientist, I'm not a philosopher, but from a philosophical perspective, I do have a perspective. I, I view all trauma simply as a challenging experience where the last chapter hasn't been written correctly.

Hmm.

And I have found in my own life, but I coach people for a living, and, you know, I worked with a NASCAR driver at one point who had a really severe wreck. The wreck itself was far more graphic than his injuries. He hardly had any injuries. But if you saw the video, it's a miracle the guy survived. I mean, it was horrific in terms of the visual, but his crew chief and his owner and saying like, he's not the same driver. Like, he takes less risks now. And, you know, I shared with him this concept of, you know, that experience is the last chapter of, you know, having the helicopter come, Put him in a stretcher and putting out the fire and all those things. That's where his story about that trauma, traumatic event ends. And that's why it's always spiking. So I find that if there's one more chapter written, and this is what I would ask you to do, is those times when you did stumble, when you did stutter, when you did do all of those things, which all of us do, by the way, and that makes you human, doesn't make you flawed. Is there has to be one more chapter after that. Okay, when— because that happened, I learned a new technique. I learned to do this. I learned to do that. But I only learned that because I screwed up in that event. So we have to attach a new inventory, a new chapter to that trauma that is directly related to, to that trauma, and that's orchestrated by you.

Mm-hmm.

I can't say to you, oh, dude, it was a long time ago. Get over it and look at all the other stuff that you're doing. You have to say, hey, you know that one time when I stuttered? After that, I— you did whatever you did. Obviously, you did a lot of good things because of that, because there was a part of you that said, you know, I don't want to do that, for yourself and for your audience. And so that's the same thing with the NASCAR driver is we then worked on how do we take that event and Because of that, how do we make something good happen?

What was the example with him? Like, what did, uh, how did you change the last chapter of that story?

Yeah, so we— I actually, in his particular case, and I'm not going to give you his name, uh, but in his particular case, he actually started to work with a lot of younger drivers and started to tell his story. And he said, I'm telling you this because, you know, don't be afraid of driving or don't be afraid of being aggressive. And, you know, the cars are so much safer now and I survived this. And so in NASCAR, there are 4 drivers per team. So he started off with his crew. And he found that as a result of that, they started coming to him more because he, you know, he made himself vulnerable. He turned his story into a source of learning and growth or somebody else. And then over the years, he went even further. Like, now he would go on interviews. Before, it was like, you know, nobody would— people would be afraid to kind of bring it up. And so he talked about some of the good things that happened to it. And literally, literally, between that and a little bit of other work, that next season— because it had been 5 years, and he was averaging somewhere between 13th and 20th place finishes. And really after that, he went straight to, he didn't win that year, but I think he had 7 top 10 finishes. So it was just amazing how he was able to sort of transform that. The example I give in my book, which is very powerful, that I want to share if you'll allow me, is MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. So when I was in college at Davidson College, that first week in freshman year, every night that first week, we had some people come in at 7 o'clock in the dorm room in this little, you know, conference room type place, like a lounge area. And one particular night, 2 women came and they were moms. And they had lost their kids to drunk drivers. It was 15 minutes long, but basically all they said to us, don't make your moms do what we're doing. And when they left, there was pinned-up silence, and like little cockroaches, we all crawled back into our rooms. And they were basically saying, hey, go out, party, you know, you're away from home, it's college, you know, but just don't drink and drive. Now, I don't know of a greater trauma than losing your child or having to bury your child. I have 2 myself. But for them to be able to take that, that the worst human experience possibly, Hmm. and convert it into a new story that they can attach that's tied to their experience and scare the living daylights out of us in a good way. We needed to hear that. Was powerful.

It's incredibly powerful. And I would invite everybody watching or listening to the podcast today to think of an experience that they need to rewrite the ending of.

Yes.

And, uh, grab a copy of this book. The book will be in the show notes below, and do the work to understand why and how you can change it. So As we get towards the back half of the conversation here, why 10 Hz? What's the spectrum? Is it 0, you're dead, and 100, you're overloaded? What's the spectrum and how do you start to assign frequency to experience?

Yeah.

Okay.

So, look, again, I'm going to go back to what I said earlier, which is simple, simple, simple. And I think for your audience, let's play, and this is mostly correct, not entirely though, but let's imagine 0 to 100.

Right?

Between zero and five, we're basically sleeping. Right? We're in very low sensory input mode, very low cognitive functioning loads. When you're sleeping, I mean, what decision do you have to make? What are you seeing, hearing? It's very, very little. You know, think about a hundred as you are ready to punch someone. Every third word coming out of your mouth is a cuss word. It's a You're loud, you're aggressive. I mean, it's just, you know, one of the worst places to be. So on that scale, 10 is pretty low, right? So have you played any sports in your, in your career?

Yes.

Okay.

I have.

Which one? Can you name one?

Yeah. In high school, I was captain of the wrestling team, and I was a Massachusetts state wrestler. I also played football, But I was a little bit better at wrestling.

And what position did you play in football?

I was a wide receiver in football.

Okay, perfect. So let's just go with that because there's more of a dynamic there. Can you think of a game when, I mean, you're completely in the proverbial zone or zen or flow or— can you think of that game?

Yes.

Yeah. And during that game, give me 3 words, the first 3 words that come to your mind individually that describe What you were thinking, feeling, or doing?

Hmm. Prepared.

Okay.

Energetic.

Okay. And were you calm and focused or agitated?

Calm and focused.

Okay.

I was going to say zone. I mean, you kind of said in the zone, which made me think of it. But yeah, calm. Yeah, absolutely.

All right. So I will tell you that literally every human being that has walked planet Earth, if I were to ask them that question irrespective of whatever it is that they do, an athlete or non-athlete, and say, hey, at your best, what were you thinking, feeling, or doing? They would use the exact same words, labels that you just did. I was calm. I was focused. I was confident. I was prepared. You know, things felt slow. So these are labels. These are English word labels. But what do all of these labels describe? Because I would argue all those words are describing one thing, but because you have lots of labels, you're just using lots of labels. But what they're really describing is 10 Hz or thereabouts. It's a specific frequency in the brain where 2 magical things are happening. Right? And the first one is that sensory input— so what we see, hear, feel, taste— is amplified. It's a low— so sensory input is always available to us. We're always seeing something, hearing something, you know, tasting something— only if you eat or drink, obviously— but these channels are always open to us. But when there's noise in our head, to use a cliché, There's now competition for that sensory input. So imagine you've had a very long day, like, and it's 5, 6 o'clock, and you get in your car and you got a 30-minute drive home, and you put some music on. And you get home 30 minutes later, and if your spouse says, hey, what music were you listening to? You probably couldn't tell them, although it was playing. You were just processing all this stuff that from the day that was stressing you out. So my point is that sensory input was available. but there wasn't space in your room for that sensory input to be processed. So people always say, be present, the power of now, be in the moment. I want you to think about what that actually means from a neuroscience perspective. All that means that in the moment, those sensory inputs are amplified. Does it not— when you're present in a moment, when you're in the moment, does that not mean you're seeing everything that there is to see? Feeling everything that there is to feel, remembering everything there is to remember about what you need to do, and hearing everything. So I feel like from a psychological perspective, we have made things more complex by saying— by using words like a zone or flow or zen or confident or deep now. These are all words. They're not real things. I understand what they mean. But there's no part in your human body called flow. And if you were to measure flow from a neuroscience perspective, the biomarkers tend to be EEG, which is measuring your brain state, heart rate, and oxygen levels in the brain. And even heart rate is a misnomer. So, for example, I'm an athlete. I do Ironmans. And there are many times I'm running and I'm looking at my watch and I'm at 140, 160 BPM, zone 4, zone 5 running. But I feel like I'm floating.

Right?

So high heart rate does not necessarily mean that you're stressed or that you're not in that zone. As a wide receiver, you felt those things even though you were running and trying to push somebody off, but you still, in that moment, you could see the whole ball coming and you almost caught it before you actually caught it. And when you caught it, you instinctively knew where you were on the field, which direction to turn to get the yards after the catch. That's sensory input amplified. That's you living in the now. So to me, it's so much easier and objective to get rid of those terms and say, I'm at 10 Hz, because at 10 Hz sensory input is amplified. The second magical thing that happens at 10 Hz, in addition to sensory input amplified, is cognitive functionality goes up. Because there's no traffic, I remember the right things. about the current situation. I remember a book that I read, an article that I saw, something that coach told me, and it's, it's more of the right inventory as opposed to what the factory setting is, which is the worst one. So as I move higher above 10, especially above 30, 40, not only do I access a limited inventory, but like we talked about trauma, I'm remembering the worst thing. I'm over a putt, I'm saying don't leave it short. The ball's coming at me and my brain says, don't drop it, dude, like the last one. Well, now you've completely subjugated sensory input. And now you become technical. Make sure your hands go over here instead of just reacting to the ball and catching it. And when you catch it, you almost like half a second, well, where am I supposed to go? And you get tackled. So I've worked with enough athletes in enough different sports Even swimming, you would think, oh, no one's playing defense against me. But, you know, the awareness of your distance per stroke, where your hands are, where your lat is, where your catch is, where your kick is, and feeling like— I love swimming because it's, for me personally, it's— I get to 10 hertz in like 3 seconds. I mean, there's something magical about that pool water or open water that, oh my goodness, you know, like there's so much, so Something is touching my whole body, like talk about sensory input. But if I'm stressed out and noisy, I don't even realize I'm swimming. I'm just like blah blah blah blah blah. But if I say, oh, I feel the water, I feel the catch, I can almost hear the sound, you know, I get into that again into that ten hertz and I lower my frequency and suddenly I know what pace I am without having to count anything. I know what my distance per stroke should be. You know, I know what a good catch feels like because that input from my lat or from the turn of my wrist and my elbow is just right. And if it's not, I can make the adjustment.

I'm excited to get to that level. I'm excited to start swimming at 10 hertz because I think I, I think I probably swim at like 30. As we talked about, yeah, swimming like golf and other sports, it's so easy to be too Yeah, I'm, I'm a little bit newer to this sport, and so I have had a couple of swimming lessons recently, but I, I haven't had enough time in the pool to achieve 10 hertz yet, but I'm getting there. And on the, on the entire, uh, metaphor of football that we just walked through, it really resonated with me. And I probably read this in your book but kind of flew over it when you said there's competition. And, and traffic. Like, I love those metaphors because there's this one play that I do think back to time to time, and I've got to change the end of this story, but there was one play my senior year where we installed a trick play that ended up going to me. So it was kind of like a flea flicker, and I was supposed to fake block and then just fly down the field in a post. And we installed it very late, and It was a big home game against a rival and I was kind of nervous and they called the play and I was just thinking about all of the messed up practice reps that we had had a couple of days before. And, you know, my girlfriend or whatever's in the stands and my family and there's thousands of people and I was just nervous and they called the play and I'm running it and all I remember is just the ball bounces off my fingertips and I don't catch it. And that's what happens when you're operating at, you know, 30, 40, 50 hertz or whatever.

That's right.

And, you know, if I could go back and redo that play, I'd slow things down and I'd get to 10 hertz first and I'd catch the ball. And we still won the game, but, you know, I didn't help us.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I work with a lot of football players in college and above. And, you know, I tell them, you know, huddle to whistle. Like, that's the only time— because in football, there's so much dead time. I mean, if you're on offense and the defense is on the field, like, you're just sitting there. You don't need to be in 10 Hz then per se. But, you know, when you break that huddle until the whistle blows, that's when you need to amplify sensory input.

Sure.

And, that's such an easier ask of a football player. Same thing with golf. I tell my golfers, like, a round of golf is 5 hours typically, but you're only hitting a shot for less than 10 minutes. You know, because you got to walk to the ball and wait for others to hit. There's a lot of wait time. And when I tell people you only need to be in 10 Hz for 10 minutes spread over 5 hours, like, oh, I can do that.

Yeah, it's very manageable.

It's— yeah, it's an easy ask of self. But so we don't have to be in 10 Hz all the time. There's no need for that. When you're driving home, you don't need to be in 10 Hz. When you're in the bathroom, you don't need to be in 10 Hz. But If we learned to choose during the course of the day, and I talk about this in my book, which are the moments that I need to be at 10? Maybe it's dinner with my spouse or a conversation with my kid or a brainstorming session at my work. Or in your case, when I'm, you know, on the field and a play is about to be called for me, oh, I'm over a putt, or I have to, you know, kick the ball, kick this.

Or I'm on a podcast.

Or I'm on a podcast. So it's a much easier ask of us ourselves. And this debunks so many of the models that are out there that, oh, I have to be the perfect person, I have to have all the time and the resources and the knowledge, and everything in my life has to be perfect for me to be perfect.

Hmm.

No, you just got to pick 2 moments and get your brain to 10. And the tools that you need to get to 10 are on your body. They're your hands and your feet and your mouth and your brain. And so sometimes I, I am afraid that someone's going to find my book and, and ban it because there are no drugs involved here. There's no subscription. You don't got to go buy anything, do anything. You just got to learn how to understand how your brain works and learn to use your hands and your feet and your mouth. which are always on you. Our body has an amazing drugstore. You don't need weed and, and, and all the other— because all those things are a biochemistry to get to 10 Hz, but they come with consequences and side effects. And you can get to that same high, you know, the calm, the focus, the preparedness, and have the moments that really matter to you be amazing. If you ask people, what's the best meal you ever had? What's the best concert that you ever went to? What's the best anything you've ever done? They will use the exact same words that you just did. Oh, I was present. The food— we tasted everything. We talked about something. Oh, like, you know, sensory input amplified. Every higher human experience and every higher human ability Seems to be happening around 10 Hz because your sensory input is amplified and your cognitive functionality— you just, without thinking, you're saying the right thing, you're being funny at the right moment, you're crying at the right moment, you're thoughtful at the right moment, you're critical at the right moment.

Well, Dr. Izzi, we have only a couple of minutes left and I've got a hard stop coming up, but I want to give you a chance to tell me In the most concise way possible, why kindness is more effective than gratitude.

Oh yeah.

In amplifying your life.

Yeah, you're gonna get me in trouble, but hey, let's go.

Let's do it.

So, I understand this huge sort of environment that we're in, in the wellness world around gratitude. I am not for a second suggesting that being grateful for what you have is any way, shape, or form negative. That is not what I'm saying. I want to get that clear. I have measured people in gratitude, and I see a spike down of somewhere between 3 to 6 Hz on average. That's good. But you know what's infinitely more powerful is kindness. So when I have someone say, okay, hey, what are you grateful for? And I've measured them, I've done thousands of these, and I say, hey, tell me some act of kindness that you did or you, you experienced. The spike down is significantly higher. It's between 20 and 30 hertz. They're getting down. But think about it. When you are describing an act of kindness, you were there. You were the hero of that movie, that experience. Your awareness to even notice something that required you to potentially do something about. Then you did it. And then you improved their experience. That collective network, because the brain works in networks, spikes the brain down, your brain down, not the person that you did it for or to, significantly. So I'm not saying everyone needs to jump off the gratitude bandwagon. But I'm saying, if you want the benefit of that, the mindfulness or the meditative benefit, you are far better off picking small acts of kindness throughout the day. Open the door for somebody. Tell the barista thank you or how was your day and mean it. Like these little acts of kindness. I'm not saying write a million-dollar check and I'm not saying go to Habitat for Humanity and build a house. Those would be great. I'm saying weave in, like pay attention to what is around you. There's someone around you or something that could be made better by something that's coming from your brain. Sometimes it's just moving a chair out of the way so that people coming into the restaurant can just, you know, have a clear path instead of having to weave their way in. Something is picking up, you know, a napkin that was dropped on the floor so that the waiter doesn't have to do it. Sometimes it's noticing that your neighbor left, you know, when they took the trash out, something dropped, pick it up and put it in. Like, these are so much more powerful. And I wish I could convince people that kindness is not a gift to others. It is an amazing cognitive gift to self.

What a beautiful way to wrap up the podcast, Dr. Izzi. Thank you so much for the conversation today. Life Explained, Chasing 10 Hertz, link in the bio for everybody watching or listening. And I look forward to our next conversation.

You got it. Thanks for having me.