183 Dr. Kyra Bobinet | Living A Well Designed Life: 10 Lessons In Brain Science

From here forward, make a promise to yourself that you are going to approach life iteratively and stop with the monolithic, you know, win, loss, you know, I'm going to do this by this date. Those are nice parameters, but really go to more of a systems approach. You know, set up a system for yourself so that it's not an accident whether you do a behavior or not and that when it doesn't happen, all you see that is experimental results. Oh, that was a result. What can I learn from that? Okay, what do I need to do now? Just ask those questions and shift the question you're asking while you try to change your life. And then the second thing I would say is compassion. That's the lubricant of making this whole thing go. It's the grease for all of behavior change.

That's Dr. Kaira Bobinet, and this is episode 183 of Wellness Force Radio. What's up, my friend? It's your host, Josh Trent. And welcome back to another episode for your weekly access to global experts in all things wellness as we discover the physical and emotional intelligence we need to live life well. In this episode, we're talking to behavior change neuroscience specialist Dr. Kyra Babinette, author of well Designed Life 10 Lessons in Brain Science and Design Thinking for a Mindful, Healthy and Purposeful Life. Now, not only is Dr. Kyra a medical doctor with a master's in public health, she also has a powerful way of connecting neuroscience and spirituality in one of my top favorite books around this fascinating subject of behavior change, which we're diving deep into on the podcast today for this timeless question, what is the answer to this that all humans universally deal with? I know what I should do. I just don't know why I do it. Has this ever been true for you? Well, you're 100% not alone in this conversation. We're exploring the answer to this question by learning the brain science and the causes behind all the mysterious things you do or don't do. And when it comes to doing the most important thing in our life, we can remind ourselves to do this one thing every, every day and all day, which is breathe. This is our breath break. Take a deep breath right now. Put your hand on your stomach. If you're driving, fill your belly. Take a five second inhale, feel the seatbelt, push on your chest and stomach. Hold it at the top for five. Let it go. You know, six deep breaths scientifically has been proven to radically change our state and our outlook on the moment we find ourselves in. And equal in the power of breathing is the foods and micronutrients we consume. Which is why my go to Resource for getting in Adaptogens, those plant powered micronutrients that give us energy from the inside out twice a day from our sponsor Organifi, creators of the Organifi Green Juice. Now check this out. Not only has Organifi partnered with wellness force in 2018, but we're also doing free giveaways every month. You can enter for a 90 day supply of Organifi Green Juice by just leaving a quick five star review for our show right from your cell phone. You can also go to wellnessforce.com review. A robot will pick you as our random winner and ship you out Organifi at the end of the month. Now if you don't win, it's okay because you still win. You can get this energy providing detoxifying green juice pow. By hopping over to Organifi.com Wellnessforce get a huge hookup 20% off use code Wellnessforce over at Organifi.com Wellnessforce for 20% off by entering code Wellnessforce get the tasty Easy Green Juice powder which I've been depending on multiple times in my afternoons to stay present and to stay on purpose. Now purpose along with health and finances and relationships. These are all things that millions of men and women tend to struggle with. Because let's be honest my friend, our society, this white picket fence chasing fame, spending time at Home Depot in the afternoon for that perfect color of bathroom tub caulk, this is an easy place for our amygdala, our subconscious mind to hide out and keep us safe. But I know that you know, the reason you and I enjoy these conversations so much on Wellness Force is because it's our constant curiosity of discovering this physical and emotional intelligence that keeps us alive. It's what makes us feel alive. But in this society we live in right now, there's not a lot of room for this inner work and this deep work that allows us to live a life of wellness. This is why I'm so honored and excited to bring you this upcoming compelling conversation with Dr. Kyra Babinette where we explore the true difference between brain science and design thinking. How to take a true reflection of our self image. Why? As a public health professional, Dr. Kyra saw data patterns from tens of millions of people that pointed her to develop the concept of fast brain and slow brain. The real definition of why our monkey mind tends to control over 90% of what we do. We also explore a new piece of information that I've never heard before. I know you're gonna be fascinated by this too. It's called the why this record keeper for failures is keeping you stuck and how to recognize and transcend that. Now this upcoming show, it's an episode for anyone that wants to live a life of better wellness with habits that serve your self care and self love practices. At the end of the day, it's the things that we do in every moment, every hour of every day and every week that shape our wellness and the fabric of who we are. But Dr. Kaira believes there is a system for us to enjoy this process. And I'm smiling right now because this is why we're here on planet Earth in the middle of outer space on a rock. And this is why I love Dr. Kaira's work so much and why I'm actually driving up in just a couple weeks to her workshop to dive deeper one on one with her. Because I'm fascinated by shifting our paradigm in the wellness industry from struggle and sacrifice when it comes to new habits towards being a designer and using the language and lifestyle principles of design thinking. If you're interested in the workshop, it's going to be on April 13th in the San Jose area. You can learn more by heading over to wellnessforce.com 183 now let's step in to this compelling conversation where we understand why exactly it is we do what we do with Dr. Kyra Babinet. Dr. Kyra Babinette is the CEO of Engaged in a design Firm using neuroscience to change Behavior, the recipient of the Harvard T.H. chan School of Public Health Innovator Award and a Teacher of Health Engagement at Stanford University. Her work and mission is to serve the health of whole populations and people and to challenge them and herself to live healthy, fulfilling lives physically, mentally and spiritually. To be engaged. Dr. Kyra, welcome to the podcast. Been so looking forward to having you on the show.

Thank you, Josh. It's really wonderful to be here.

We're talking about something today we all can relate to. It's our brain, body and soul connection. This exploration of what I deem really the universal human experience. Experience. We can't always get ourselves to do what we truly know is best for us. I want to start off this conversation your book well designed life 10 lessons in brain Science and Design Thinking for a healthy, mindful and purposeful Life. This book came through you. How many years did it actually take for you to create this book?

You know, I was resistant to writing a book. I'm kind of lazy and so it seemed like a very big project. So it happens that a book that size kind of exceeds my brain's ability to. To keep it all together at some point. So have to take a lot of notes. And the real impetus for it was that I kept doing all these keynotes and people would get so jazzed about what I was talking about with the brain and how to change behavior. And they just, they wanted, you know, naturally, the next step. They said, you know, where can I go to read more or learn more? Is there a book on this? I said, well, you know, like dozens of books and hundreds or thousands of articles. So I wanted to condense it all down and make a really easy, accessible guide for people who really care about and are active in changing behavior.

You've been in health for so many years now. We see changes happening at this intersection of technology and behavior change. You know, the most emails we've gotten Kyra, about how do I change my behavior for the long term. Just to start us off here, you know, we look at the brain and how it operates, everything. But we also know we're a soul. You know, this concept of being half of a beast, half of a spirit. We're floating on this rock in the middle of outer space. How would you define behavior change from your perspective?

Yeah, so everything that I've come to know is really centered on the brain and how the brain changes behavior. So we know that the brain is capable of neuroplasticity. And this is no small discovery because growing up I was told that old dogs don't learn new tricks. And that was such a fixed belief in a way of really keeping people from becoming the people they can become. And so what's wonderful now is with science we understand that the brain is very malleable and that it can switch gears and it can make new connections and new networks and build new sort of muscles, if you will, of doing things a new way. And you see this in physical training too. You know, you might hold your posture poorly and then when you train it up, you get a whole different result.

Yeah, this behavior change, this continuum, it is not linear. We're always iterating. I love the way you describe this too. When you look at designing, being a designer, you consider yourself to be a designer, not just somebody that's interested in behavior change. This brain science and design thinking. Can you expound upon maybe the definition between brain science and design thinking?

And you know, I want the entire world, honestly, Josh, to learn how to design their lives. I want them to see themselves as Designers, because really that's what we are doing. We are co creating this reality and we are an active part of it. And you know, in my work, in my research, what I see is there's basically two types of people. There's people who think like designers and who are designers, and people who are still struggling, struggling with the concept. So, you know, for me, brain science and design thinking are different in two ways. One is that brain science is really how your brain works and why it does what it does. It kind of shows why we do what we do, how we do it and what we do. Whereas design thinking is more the future. You know, it's what we can become, it's what we can transform ourselves into. And so it's a good tool. And they are so interdependent that, you know, if, you know, brain science alone, you won't really be able to change much. You know, if, you know, design thinking alone, then you may miss some realities and cast off into sort of behavior fantasies, what I call it, you know, when you only use design thinking, you can get a little bit unrealistic really quickly.

I love that you talked about fantasies because a lot of people, they might gather as much knowledge as possible. And I know you've seen this in your work. You know, some of the biggest organizations in the world you consult with. And we're all human beings. I mean, this human experience is universal. The bridge between getting information and then taking inspired action. For this continuum of behavior change, they're two separate things. I love that you talk about self image, and this is what fascinated me the most. I read the book twice. I've listened to it, the entire thing. This is not something I typically do. I went deep for this conversation because this is a passion that I have. A lot of people know this. My mother was bipolar. I dealt with anxiety and depression. I was £280 at one point in my life. So this book hit the heart for me. You describe self image, though I look at the kid that I was. A lot of people can relate to this. You know, that young child, young man, young woman, inside of us. You say for self image. As part of my work as a designer of behavior change, I've asked thousands of people about their food, exercise and health habits. As a public health pro, I've studied health data patterns of tens of millions from this. What I know is that people stick to and what works for them always has a heuristic link to their self image.

That's right.

Can you talk about self image and that heuristic Link?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think one of the things that liberates people is to realize that it's not because you are doing it wrong. It's not because what you've picked is inaccurate. It's that you have a gravity to your self image that's always going to pull you back. So we recently did a study, even last week on people who have lost weight. And the largest percent of people in our study were from the segment of relapsers, people who have relapsed, who have regained the weight back. And it really is this kind of self image of I'm a person who is X pounds that kind of pulls them back subconsciously from the weight loss that they've made. And so there's a fundamental function in our brain of keeping the self image intact. If I was an overweight kid, I may want to react not consciously, but unconsciously reassume that identity because it just feels so weird for so long being the thinner person. And so it really is the biggest battle that people have. And then there's also, you know, to be honest with you, metabolic set points that align with that self image. Our chemistry, our blood chemistry is still pulling back to that previous self because it's so uncomfortable when we're changing our behavior that we go through a kind of a valley of discomfort, if you will. If we understand that that's going to happen and that that's okay and it's normal, then we can withstand what that feels like and not freak out.

That's the key word. Not freak out. This heuristic part, too. Let's talk about this. Dan Pardi and his work with human OS and behavior change has mentioned heuristics on the show. For people that don't know the true meaning of a heuristic, what is that to us, our brain, and what is the definition of that?

Yeah, so basically an easy way to remember what heuristic means is your brain's super lazy and it just wants to make everything a shortcut that it can. So the way that you shower in the morning, the order with which you brush your teeth, the leg that you put into the pants first, those are all heuristics. And it's meant to be conserving of energy so that we can just live our lives, you know, with autopilot for most things that we repeat every day. And so when it comes to psychological things or understanding things, there's heuristics that we deploy to boil things down so we don't feel so uncomfortable with not knowing or not understanding or spend too much mental energy on something like that. And a good example of this is when people learn of a new concept of any kind, their brains are automatically going to do this matching game. Oh, that's like this, or oh, that's like this other thing I've read or this other thing that I know. And so that they can start to build a base of knowledge and also be comfortable at the same time.

This unconscious almost shortcut. It's the rule of thumb as you describe in your book. It helps us save time. We only have so much decision making power. You write about Steve Jobs bore the same kind of black turtleneck every day. Why did he do that? Can you share with us this decision fatigue, how that goes into behavior change and design?

Yeah, so basically we wake up every morning, we just have this kind of finite amount of gas in the tank, the tank being slow brain. And of course it's, you know, biodiesel or something like that. But, you know, we run out basically during the day because we use it up to resist things, to, you know, force ourselves to do things, to think through difficult problems at work, to make decisions about dinner. And by the time our day is over, we are completely exhausted. And we then shift gears into more fast brain resources, which is these kind of autopilot heuristics, you know, biases, all the jumping to conclusions and assumptions and not really wanting to spend or having the ability to spend mental energy on them.

This monkey mind. The heuristics exist in the fast brain.

That's right. And the fast brain controls about 95% of what we do. Every single behavior that we have has a bunch of heuristics like, you know, brushing teeth next to the sink, you know, toothbrush next to the sink, toothpaste next to toothbrush. Those kinds of things are associations in our brain that help us make these shortcuts.

The fast brain, the slow brain. Let's dig into this. You have firsthand experience, even before medicine, even before behavior change. In designing a life as a mom, can you share with us the differentiation between fast brain and slow brain? I think it really relates to everyone's journey, especially the moms listening to understand this.

When you are exhausted or when you are stressed, or when you are focused on somebody else and not yourself, then you're most likely going to use your fast brain to kind of get through those moments. And slow brain is more planning out the week, planning out your kid's schedule, planning out what they're going to wear the next day, those kinds of things. The more you can think ahead and put the slow brain into action beforehand, the more powerful it is so that you don't have to make it up on the fly with your fast brain, which usually does things like go through the drive through which I have been guilty of many, many times. When I was a single mom and had young kids, I would just take the fast brain route to dinner because I hadn't made any sort of plan ahead of time.

Yeah, this fast brain, slow brain, one of them, it's really wired to the amygdala, which you talk about in your work so much, this ancient system in our brain. But Dr. Cairo, we're not in the ancient world anymore. I mean, this modern world is filled with us being distracted and not enough breath, not enough body intelligence, not enough understanding of how do we design our environment, how do we stack the odds in our favor. I want to go back to your story. In the book. You talk about when you were designing your life, there was one moment where you had gone through a lot of turmoil. You realized you had to be a powerful mom. You had to step into that space to show up for your family. And then you thought, oh my gosh, I have this back fat that I never knew about before. What is happening right now? Take us there. Because a lot of people can relate to this.

You know, again, when you're stressed, you make poor choices. And, you know, it wasn't that I would have told you consciously that I was stressed. It's that I was unconsciously stressed. And so I would go to our favorite coffee shop in the world every day and get a chai latte, which was 53 grams of sugar and didn't realize that I was not burning that off because I was working from a laptop all day and those sorts of things. And so it really got me going in the morning to have this tiny shot of caffeine, this amazing huge shot of sugar and this warmth and this flavor and everything. And that was my treat to myself. I think, you know, because as a mother, you are constantly sacrificing for your children and supporting other people. There's little ways in which you. That I, I should say was treating myself that were not long term thinking it was more short term rewards. And that's something that the brain is very, very good at, is, you know, these dopamine cycles and, and you know, getting this reward system kicking in response to, you know, in this case, an addiction to, to latte.

We've all had those foods that call our name when we're stressed. Yours I believe was eating mozzarella cheese balls. And it got to the point where you were so tired, you started to make this connection, huh? Every time I eat this food, I go to sleep. You were stopping at a truck stop once, and you ate an ice cream sundae, and then you slept for a whole day. Your dad wakes you up in the morning and says, hey, did you want to get up in the next 24 hours? Take us to this point, because so many people, we understand this relationship between food and our emotions. But this was forged for you. I mean, creating this book and your work now, this came almost through you. I feel like your experiences really forged this book.

Yeah. So, you know, the blessing was a food allergy that I basically developed because I had a tainted bin of these mozzarella balls. And I, of course, scarfed them all down and got myself really, really sick because they were not, you know, they were tainted with some sort of bacteria. And my body then developed antibodies to milk protein. So anytime I would have a milk product, you know, you mentioned ice cream or those kinds of things, I would completely pass out. And it was not a good thing because I was oftentimes alone with my small children playing with their dolls, and I would fall asleep and wake up in a sweaty panic wondering what happened. It was like somebody had drugged me. So even though I knew that that was happening and I knew that I shouldn't eat dairy, I would do it because I wanted it, because I craved it, because. And I would suffer the consequences. And it was through multiple, multiple feedback loops of doing this, passing out, suffering the consequences, coming back to and realizing, okay, I got to give this up. But it probably took about a year for me to fully give it up and say, okay, I'm done with this, because it just has too many consequences.

How did you design that? Because this line of work, it doesn't come easy. When we look at designing our environment, you had to go through quite a bit of learning curves. I think at one point you had gone to a physician and they suggested, hey, maybe you should be gluten and dairy free. But just knowing is not enough. This designing aspect that you help so many others with, how did you design once you found the information?

Well, I think this is a good story because that is the previous part of me that didn't know to design Josh. Because it was before I learned about design thinking. It was before I understood how my brain worked. And so nowadays, I would do it faster, I would do it better, because I would realize that I needed to put things in Place I was missing the how. I knew what I should do. I didn't know why I was not doing it, and I didn't have a how of how to do it differently. And so the thing that I notice between people who can design their behavior and people who cannot is that the people who can don't have to spend a year in feedback loops frustrating themselves and constantly feeling bad about themselves for not doing what they know they should do. They actually put systems into place. We've done a lot of research with people with chronic disease and people who take their medication or who take care of themselves. It's not a mystery. Their whole house is set up to do this. Their shoes are by the door, their gym bag is packed. Their medications are in a specific and vitamins are in a specific place in the house. They have a grocery shopping schedule. And the rest of them, people who are not doing everything they can for themselves, it's like a big mystery. If you look at their home, it's a miracle that any of it happens. And it just kind of on a whim that it happens. And so I want to just point to the listeners that, you know, I would do it differently now. I would create a system by which I wouldn't have that experience, and I would get there faster.

Getting there faster comes from knowledge, but also it comes from failing. I mean, some of the mistakes that you made were around iterating and constantly being open to the new phases of change for people that are beginning. You know, someone's listening, like, wow, I really understand what she's talking about because I'm experiencing that discomfort right now. How do they take a breath and assess their current environment?

So I think, you know, the magic word there is iteration. You know, I think before when I was going through that experience with the dairy, it was just about failing and then feeling bad about myself and feeling ashamed, feeling frustrated. And the word iteration, to me is this kind of like, ah, you know, freedom from all of that, you know, oppression that we do to ourselves. And your iteration is just saying, okay, that didn't work, I didn't fail. That failed. And being able to place the blame on the thing you tried or that maybe there was a missing piece or the experiment was a failure, but you are not a failure. That's the really important distinction. Because anatomically, in our brains, if we think we failed, it basically registers a signal in an area of our brain called the habenula, which is something that, as I was writing the book, I was completely hyperventilating with excitement to Learn about this, because the habenula basically tracks our failure. And if we fail at something, we will not try it again. Because the habenula down regulates our motivation to try that thing again. And originally it was supposed to keep us from touching the stove over and over and over again like an idiot. But in this case, it prevents us from doing the right thing, which is to try again, to forgive ourselves and go ahead. And the only way to get around that benula is to iterate is to think. The story that you tell yourself is, I'm just figuring it out. That's my job, not to do it, but to figure out how to do it.

This habenula is so ancient, it's involved in how we basically lean into our edge of discomfort. I mean, I almost feel like the habenula is a record keeper for failures.

That's right. It is a failure counter. And it has its foot on the pedal of motivation. And so no one knew that there was this linkage between me feeling like a failure and me feeling like I don't want to try again. And it's not conscious, it's unconscious. Certainly people who are really insightful can go, oh, yeah, if I feel like I failed at that, I don't want to try that again. But we didn't realize or appreciate medically, clinically, how important and how tied those two things are together.

A lot of people that have a big list, I mean, maybe their list goes all the way to the floor of, quote, failures. When you were that mom who was eating the cheese and didn't know too much about designing her life back then, what was the narrative from the habenula? And then what is the narrative now?

That I'm a bad person, That I know better, that I've tried to stop and I can't stop, that I feel out of control. You know, I think very much the same narrative that most people have who are not in the designer category, this designer mindset.

What does it really mean to have this mindset of a designer, especially when we look at letting go of old weight? I think the reason that probably what I'm learning from you in real time here, this is so fascinating. The habenula, this record keeper for failures. How do we take on that mindset of a designer and ignore the ancient habenula?

Yeah, so the mindset is kind of, you know, if you were to go through a minefield or an area where there's potholes, this is basically the map of how to get around that. Because the mindset keeps you safe. It's a fail safe. When you think that you are iterating on your behavior, you're going to be in a different area of blood flow in your brain, which is a metacognitive state is what we call it. And in that metacognitive state, you know, for example, there's you who's listening to me, and then there's you who's watching you. Listen to me. That second part of you is the mindset home that I want you to stay in. That's the sort of observer, kind of dispassionate, non judgmental part of you that can actually take charge and be the master of your own fate. And in fact, you know, there's. There's even different neural networks in the brain for intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. Meaning I do it for myself or I do it for somebody else, or for a external reward or payment or, you know, acknowledgement or praise or whatever. We see this with kids with grades, you know, kids who get good grades and then they're paid for their grades. You know, you're changing their intrinsic motivation to an extrinsic motivation. And what that means in the brain is that you've switched channels. The intrinsic motivation is tied to, to your sense of self satisfaction, your sense of I'm in charge versus when you're doing it for an external party. The brain tells you somebody else has control over you. And so the mindset is really about, I'm in charge, I'm the master here, I'm the driver, I'm the designer, whatever metaphor resonates best for you and being able to not see failure as a failure, but just see it as something that are trying to figure out, wow.

Okay, so what I'm hearing from you is that we do have this old ancient system, the Habenula, in our brain that does in a way keep us safe. And maybe 10,000 years ago, it did do a great job of keeping us safe, because the odds were a lot higher back then. We don't have as many threats to our safety, our security in 2018. It just doesn't exist. So then I guess the deep question here is with this mindset of a designer, don't all roads initially and kind of existentially lead to self love? Don't all roads lead to self love?

I think that's a very good companion. You know, the mindset is really just about, you know, what our story is about, what we're doing, you know, because we have some subconscious story as to why I'm doing this. You know, for example, we see a lot of people in our studies who say, I want to drink water, but their secret goal is to lose weight. They're not really want to drink water, but that's the safe thing to say. And so the story that they're telling themselves is, I'm just drinking water here. But really they're harboring this secret wish that they'll lose weight as a result. And so what we do with the mindset is we say, I really want to figure out how to lose weight. I'm not going to lose five pounds by March or April. I'm going to figure out how I can get myself to do that thing. So we're shifting the story, reframing the story of what we think we're doing. And then the compassion comes in and the self love comes in as a partner in that, so that it keeps us from registering that we failed with the mindset. And then it also helps us to have patience with ourselves and to be forgiving with ourselves and to not have sort of a negative emotional trail from our efforts. We can recover, we can regroup with compassion.

It's outsmarting this Habenula. But I also think it has a lot to do with what you talked about through the observer. You know, medicine comes from breathing. And there's a point in your book where you gave such a tactical tool. It was to put the hands on the chest over the heart, because that's medicine. People have medicine right there through breathing and touching their heart. That I believe is a direct connection to the observer. Would you agree with?

Yes. The observer is the ones lifting your arms and putting them on your heart because it realizes that that's what you need. And so we all have this sort of inner healer that we have, this designer that we're talking about today that can come to our own aid. And that is the part that lights up the brain in terms of I'm in charge here, you know, the metacognitive circuits, you know, the intrinsic motivation circuits. That is the empowered state, the current.

Self, the future self. This is another incredible metaphor that you talk about in your work. Understanding what matters most is this relationship, the underlying self image between what we will do and what we won't do, but also our past self versus our future self, our current self. Can you talk about this? How did you come up with this narrative, this metaphor? It's utterly intriguing to me because I think all of us get to ask ourselves this deep question. Are the habits and is the lifestyle I have in this moment, is that something My future self would love me for.

Right, exactly, exactly. And this is a funny awareness that I gained around this because, you know, I am not a disciplined exerciser. I kind of do it on the fly or when I have time. And that's a very high risk exerciser, by the way. I don't recommend it. But when I was comparing myself to person on my team who used to be a professional athlete and I heard her story about how she plans her exercise, she had every single moment, every single exercise, every single part of every exercise, she would not bring her phone because she didn't want to be distracted. She would just go, she would do her business, she would work out super hard and she would leave the gym. And it was so regimented and so lockstep that I realized, oh my gosh, her past self set up a regimen for her future self that her future self is dutifully and obediently carrying out. Unlike my future self, who tends to make changes or make it up on the fly or leave it to chance or it's a big miracle that it happens and that kind of thing. And so going back to that whole systems thing, it's a way of creating systems for your future self, you know, using this metaphor of the past self. But then we also have to look at, is the past self a good person? You know, are they being fair? Are they being kind? You know, waking me up at five in the morning to go running is not a kind designer, you know, so we need to think about the past self, future self as a relationship so that we can align them together and say, you know, if I'm designing for my future self, is she going to want to do this? Is she going to enjoy doing this? Or is she going to rebel against me or am I being unrealistic because I know she's going to be too busy to do that thing. And people who are high performers have a very tight, airtight relationship between their past self and their future self. That's the only thing that makes them different.

Why is that? Why is that relationship so tight for the A type personality?

You know, because they've made a deal with themselves. They've either created a mental model where they are going to do, come hell or high water, what they said they would do, what their past self obligated them to do, or they're so good at predicting what they will want to do or what they will enjoy that it's like the best relationship in the world. It's like, you know, being in a relationship with your best Friend who is serving you, you know, nothing but successful opportunities and things to do. Yeah.

Wow. It's really, you know, the motivational source we contrast on the show. So much inspiration versus motivation. Inspiration, it's like a well that, that springs from inside you. Motivation might be like, you know, getting 100 bucks for an A on a report card. Which one of those is more sustainable? And really why?

You know, I don't think either. You know, I think motivation. You know, in the motivation chapter, that was the hardest one for me to write. And the reason why is that the literature, the scientific literature on motivation is so complicated. And the way it's spoken of in, you know, common lay terms is really confusing and very unhelpful. For example, my big sort of irritation with the world is I got to get more motivated. I don't like that phrase because it's not fair to the person saying it. They're going to hate themselves afterwards. But what it is in the brain, and again, I always go back to the brain, the brain actually experiences motivation as either stable or unstable. Me serving my kids or keeping them alive is a stable motivation. It is on all the time. You wake me up at three in the morning, that one's on. If I'm sick and in bed, that one's on. It's the thing that dominates the rest of my behavior. If we understand that my desire to work out after work then gets trumped by my sick kid because that motivation is more stable and my motivation, my fleeting motivation to try to squeeze in a workout is unstable, then I can understand how to design for my motivation.

If you're enjoying this conversation as much as I am, click on your phone. You can immediately download this copy. You can order a copy of well Designed Life or you can go to WellnessForce Radio. My question here about the future self is it's really the self image of the future self that is going to matter when the time comes. That line you wrote hit me the hardest. I mean, I literally took a deep breath when I read that because I thought, wow, if my future self, if I can close my eyes with my eyes closed and see my future self in love with their life, on purpose, on mission, on point, that's what's going to matter. When I come to the chocolate cake moment or the anger versus love moment, or the how am I going to show up powerfully and be heart centered in this moment, why is that self image of the future self so important? In these moments of decision, your self.

Image is the filter of everything you do and don't do. We just don't always know in the moment which self image is governing. So is it the self image of myself as an aspiring healthy person? Is it the self image of myself as an overweight kid? You know, those kinds of things are constantly negotiating, you know, and the strength in the moment of one versus the other is this kind of stability, instability, motivation. And so, you know, in my case, I do a lot of research on weight and eating and health and those kinds of things. And one of the more recent findings in the literature is a study where they had people in an MRI machine which scans your brain, and they had them make food choices within this context. And the people who were overweight or obese inevitably chose things based on taste. That's a very immediate gratification motivation. But people who were normal weight or were lean always thought about the health benefits of the thing they were eating. And so just shifting what you focus on in that moment and which self image you're coming from dictates what ultimately is going to happen.

These choices, it goes up and down. There is peaks and valleys. And there's a chapter on relapsing that I thought was just incredibly fascinating. And there's a quote here from Lawrence Gonzalez to lead off one of your chapters in Nature adaptation is important. The plan is not. Can you tell us about that?

I think the biggest mistake in behavior change right now is that we don't acknowledge relapse as a actual phase of change. We resist it, we ignore it, we judge it. I feel like we should embrace it. It's not a matter of if you relapse, it's a matter of when. Why are we working against nature? Why are we denying that this is going to inevitably happen? And then, oop, big surprise, it happened. And then I feel like a piece of shit. In order to save people from that unnecessary suffering, I feel like we need to say, okay, plan for relapse and watch it happen, watch it evolve. For example, I do a cleanse every month with my husband and we started out with the clean program, which is a 21 day, very strict with smoothies, the whole bit, very restrictive list of foods that you can eat. It's supposed to be helpful for inflammatory response. I did it very rigorously for the first couple months and then I started to rebel. Then I started to say, I don't like smoothies, I'm not a smoothie drinker, self image. And I adapted and I iterated it. And now where I'm at is I make a giant thing of wild rice Chicken soup at the beginning of my cleanse and I kind of eat off of that for days at a time. And I have a couple other sort of safe foods, but I couldn't do the smoothies normally. In my past self, before I knew about design, before I knew about iteration, and before I knew about relapse, I would have just given up. I would have said, I can't do this, this isn't for me, I can't cleanse. And I probably would have told all my friends, I can't cleanse, I'm not a cleanser. But now I have adapted it to myself and I watch myself relapse sometimes. Certain months I relapse hard and I will cheat just because I've got so much pent up energy of resisting my past self for putting me up to it. And I'm not in the mood to have a cleanse this month or whatever.

Yes, it's really what avoids the shame spiral. I feel like this shame spiral of, hey, when I look at life and you see, talk about this through a lens of a designer, there's compassion and love baked in. You can avoid the pitfall of having a two week or a month shame spiral because the ego's like, hey, you need to be perfect. And then this shame spiral can literally be hopped over by just being a designer. It's like the failures don't exist there. It's just, how do I iterate next? Right?

Yeah. And if you look at research studies, I think a 10,000 person weight loss study that they did, actually people who relapsed the shortest had the greatest results over time. So the length of time that you wallow in your relapse, in your story of relapse, the worse it's gonna get for you. So it behooves all of us to be, okay, let's just get back on, you know, let's just iterate our way out of this, you know, okay, I've relapsed. You know, I'm fully. Sometimes you watch yourself relapse. The hand is going up to the mouth and you're watching it happen kind of in slow motion like, no, but, but we have to just again, compassion, apply compassion liberally and just try again as soon as possible. Just try anything as soon as possible to see what you can do to get yourself to do that thing again.

This is why I love your work so much. Because there's this blend of emotional intelligence and honestly, the spirituality component to what you do and also the hard science, the academia. So then why do we experience these opportunities, you call them, you know, EI and eq really, these two things that can be yielded growth in through thresholds of discomfort. I mean, why do you think these thresholds even exist for us?

I think it's just a function of, you know, when we come from ego, the world can see that and we can't see it, but it exacts a consequence on us because we are rigid, we are self absorbed and our suffering helps us to be more pliable, more flexible, you know, I mean, or we suffer worse. You know, it's always a choice, right? We can suffer even worse. I can be a full victim by the end of the year if I want to be, or I can start to open my mind and take responsibility for myself and ask myself different questions, like why is this happening to me? What am I not seeing? What am I not listening to? You know, what's this pattern that is emerging that I'm suffering from that to me, makes us better people. I mean, I was a very arrogant, egotistical, non compassionate medical student at the very beginning. And it wasn't until I became pregnant and had every manner of diseases that I laughed at before I got pregnant, like carpal tunnel. I was like, that's not a thing, you know, but it was a thing and I got it. I had every manner of physical suffering and continue even today. I have a back injury from a yoga class a year and a half ago that I'm iterating the crap out of it and figuring out how to become adapted to my pain or whatever. But I never had compassion as much as I do now for people who had back pain. I'm like, really? You can't get up? Like, I couldn't relate. And so the emotional intelligence comes through really being humbled and being stripped of our egos and that's really the only way that we can understand.

Oh, this is so honest. And I love this point right in our conversation because so many people can relate. And I think back to when I was, as you described, the observer in slow motion, watching the cookie go in the mouth. We've all been there. This is a human condition. I feel like this is why your work can be so powerful. It's the new narrative for 2018. I'm just gonna claim this here. We've had so many people on the show that are talking about behavior design, you know, Nir Eyal, which I know you respect deeply. And one of your mentors, BJ Fong, this tiny habits model. Now, no offense to those gentlemen, because I respect their Work as well. But what I think you've articulated a little bit differently here is the human side of all the academic literature and all the ways, all the systems thinking, which really comes down to this intersection of being a designer and practicing self love and self care. This has been a huge takeaway for me personally, which I know is going to ripple out in so many different future shows. I have to ask you then, as we discover more and more about ourselves, about our emotional intelligence, what are some things pragmatically that people can do? You know, they're feeling some energy from this conversation. How do they go to a pragmatism step here? What are a couple things they can do when they put the phone down, when they step out into their day after this?

I think the one thing is just to make a resolve to shift your mindset from goals orientation to iterative mindset, you know, designer mindset, whatever you want to call it, I don't really care or growth mindset. Carol Dweck has defined that for education, whatever resonates with people. But from here forward, make a promise to yourself that you are going to approach life iteratively and stop with the, you know, monolithic, you know, win loss, you know, I'm going to do this by this date. Those are nice, you know, parameters to try to set for yourself, but, but really go to more of a systems approach. Set up a system for yourself so that it's not an accident whether you do a behavior or not, and that when it doesn't happen, all you see that is experimental results. Oh, that was a result. What can I learn from that? Okay, what do I need to do now? Just ask those questions and shift the question you're asking while you try to change your life. And then the second thing I would say is compassion. That's the lubricant of making this whole thing go. You know, you only get stuck if you are not compassionate on yourself or for yourself or for others. It's the grease for all of behavior change.

You also talked about eating for volume, which I think is interesting here for people that need that stretch response for the leptin to be released in the stomach wall. How have you been eating for volume?

Typically, I do a couple things. One is I realize for myself that I do better with intermittent fasting. So every day I don't break kind of my seal on eating until about noon, and that's about 12 to 15 hours, usually on intermittent fasting. And then I can accommodate my real desire or my self image around being a volume eater. And so I'll have one really large meal instead of the six small meals. That is a recipe for weight gain for me. Because once you break that seal on eating, I am go for the rest of the day. And so I found that I can't get myself to stop eating early in the day and starve all night because I tend to get really grumpy and want to eat. But I can fast from the time I go to bed as long as possible the next day.

And the interesting part about this too is that you've identified that by being a designer, if you were trying to fit yourself into a template, you would not have had that greater self awareness. And I feel like all roads do lead to this. As we talked about earlier, self love, self awareness. What does faith play as a role and also spiritual practice in this experience? Because on one side of this we need academia, we need education and knowledge. What role does faith play, though?

You know, for me, all spirituality is a mechanism by which we release our ego. You know, submit to larger truths, to collaboration with others and render ourselves safe and trustworthy for other people to be around. And so that to me is kind of a function of spirituality. And you know, there's things like, you know, becoming more loving, becoming more generous, those sorts of things that, that also bring a sense of well being to our lives as well. But to me, you know, the science is there. If we have a big ego or we already know, or we hate ourselves or any of those sort of ego forms, whether it's positive or negative, then we are not going to apprise ourselves of the wisdom that's out there. We're not going to know and learn how this beautiful vehicle of the brain that sits in our head operates. You know, some people have an insula, which is another area of the brain, an insula that the second you put food in front of it, it fixates on it. Other people have an insula that could care less about the presence or absence of food and knowing that that's you. The brain you have is super important to work with who you are. And that requires giving up ego and sort of false forms of what you're trying to protect yourself from or what you're trying to promote in order to get what you want. When you strip all that away, you can just live more naturally in who you are and what vehicle you have in your head and adapt to it.

Where did you get this insight? Because you talk about a meditation teacher. You had Sylvia, she was 19, she gave up being in college to devote her life to helping others find the awakening inside. You also though, have an interesting ancestry where there's a lot of tradition, bohemia and things like this. From those two, I mean, what's shaped you in your connection to faith and the higher power?

I had a spiritual awakening when I was a freshman or first year medical student and that was a whole journey unto itself. But from that point forward, I felt led to give up ego forms. I felt led to give up my arrogance and to really devote myself to the service of others, but also to fill myself up from within and through my connection to the greater all. I don't have a name for it anymore because my concepts have been stripped away over the years. But there is this greater connection that we have with all of life. And right now I live in a place that's beautiful. 160 acres of redwood forest and ridgeline views in the Santa Cruz mountains. And I manifested that on purpose because I feel that nature is one of those resources or reservoirs of spirituality for everybody. My Native American ancestors and my bohemian ancestors were both people who were very close to nature and that kind of came through that lineage.

It's interesting because you have this deep connection to your past and your lineage, but also the academic lens and being involved with Stanford. So I think it's this beautiful way that you're shaping other people. This old school ancient wisdom applied to our modern, digitally focused and exponentially technology growing world. So then we find ourselves at the big question for the podcast, and it's about wellness. You know, we understand we're mind, body, spirit. We are this physical and emotional intelligence all wrapped in one. How would you define wellness? In other words, how would you see wellness for your life?

Again, you can see the theme with me is that I feel like you can always go back to the brain. What else is there besides the brain and how we're experiencing things in terms of these kinds of questions? The brain experiences wellness in four predictive neural networks. One is resilience, which is an area in the ventromedial PFC prefrontal cortex. And sorry about all the jargon, but it's just basically center of your forehead basically allows you to recover from any sort of upsetting information or emotional trauma or those kinds of things. And another one is generosity. When we give to others, we feel well. Another one is our outlook. Gratitude is a really powerful tool there. And then finally it's our focus, our ability. You mentioned the beginning of the podcast. So distracted right now, and that is shredding our sense of well being and our wellness and Meditation and the sort of upsurgence of mindfulness is I see a natural response in humans to hey, where'd my focus go? Where did my attention go? You know, I can't focus on anything. And that's what differentiates us honestly from a squirrel, right? And so we want to be human. We want to be human and we want to feel human and we want to feel well and in control. And the only way to do that is mediated through our focus and attention.

We have scratched the surface of this book. Everyone's gonna pick it up. Well designed life 10 lessons in brain Science and Design Thinking for a Mindful, healthy and Purposeful life For people that have had their curiosity sparked. Where do they go? To learn more about not only your book but also your neuroscience firm that.

You have books on Amazon. Our training center if you wanna train with me is changetrainingcenter.com and my company is engaged in and we do behavior change design for health and wellness products and programs and companies.

Thank you so much. I just want to acknowledge the work that you're bringing this ancient wisdom, this tradition based wisdom about our breath, how powerful of a tool compassion is and self love and knowing that it's also our responsibility to gather the information that's going to allow us to take this inspired action for the long term. So just so respect your work. Such a gem of a conversation with you and we look forward to following you for the rest of the year and beyond.

Thank you for your podcast Josh. This is an amazing service that you're doing for the world and thank you for all the listeners who are co creating it with you.

I received that and we will talk to you guys very soon as we explore more at this intersection of physical and emotional. Dr. Kyra Babinet, thank you so much for being on the show.

Thank you.

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