Can You Actually Rewire Your Brain? with Dr. Dave Rabin

23:25Thank you so hard for doing such beautiful work for me. Yeah, thank you so much for removing all that trash and taking care of all my memories. Never dividing yourself just being so strong. Oh my God. Well, so here's what's so cool about these cells is that part of the reason why they're able to survive for so long is not because they work independently of each other. It's because they function as a network. I was going to say they all work together. They all work together. Oh my God. So even on the single cellular level or the cellular network level, these cells by themselves will not survive long.

23:57The reason why they're able to function with a lifetime of chronic stress is because they have networks between them that distributes the stress between the whole cellular layer. They're a community. Exactly. And there's junctions that like almost imagine like if a cell is a person in a community, it's the person holding hands with another person that says, I'm feeling stress and just squeezing that person's hand and letting them know. And then that person comes over to help. Right. And it's like that instant level of reaction that distributes stress throughout the community, which is exactly how indigenous people and over thousands of years have dealt with stress and trauma and mental illness is as a community helping each other in real time, always being there.

24:40There's no before labeling it. They're there to support. Right. before shaming somebody for doing something wrong, they're there to support and relieve the stress and distribute the burden. Have you noticed in the conversation I have with people like you, the deeper that we go into science, the more I'm like, this is magic. This is so beautifully spiritual, so divinely designed. Yeah, that's what the book's about, which is about how we have spent thousands of years searching for empirical knowledge, like knowledge that we can see to basically prove the existence of God. And now finally in the 21st century, thanks to the discovery of everything from psychedelics to biofeedback, breathwork, all the neuroimaging stuff, we've done it.

25:25We've actually proven, and I lay out the proof in the book about that we now know definitively that whether you call it God or source or divinity or spirituality, it's real. It's there. It's scientifically provable. You change your breath. You change your biology. You pray. You change your biology. you believe in something bigger than yourself you change your biology, you extend your lifespan that's spirituality in scientific practice so we don't need to spend any time wasted anymore questioning or doubting and being stressed about feeling alone because we're never alone we're always connected to each other we're 99.9 % the same genetically, we're just different versions of the same exact stardust as the table and the bananas and everything else around us like we're literally all part of the same stuff and we we all need each other to survive we're not like our differences are about enrichment they're not meant to divide us division is our biggest enemy as a society the only reason we've survived this long as a species is because we work together like you know so and there's entire portions of the brain that are devoted to this to empathy and connection and dolphins speaking of dolphins dolphins are one of the highest order species, creatures that has this same empathy, very highly developed empathy part of the brain that we have called the insula, which elephants have, some great apes have.

26:50And that part of the brain is really important because it's activated by eye contact, soothing touch, soothing music, Apollo, these things that soothe the body to increase vagus nerve activity until the amygdala, which is the reptilian brain, the fear center that sits in the middle, that's always blinking off, firing off when newness and uncertainty are around that we might be afraid of. It says, hey, you're safe enough to have this experience right now. You're not under survival threat. You have enough air, water, food, shelter. You're safe enough to be here now and have this experience. And so the insula gets activated by contact, eye contact, right?

27:27First and foremost. Over a distance, we're sending each other signals that say, hey, I see you. You're another human. I'm another human. We're safe. It's a natural autistic people. But they can get it too. it just we have to train them differently and we do i do right now but by the way it's so funny because now my daughter will now she'll lock in and you're like whoa it's like when you make eye contact with you it's like you feel like someone's staring into your soul it's like the most powerful eye contact you've ever received yeah speaking of vagus nerve but so she's going to an intensive in orange county when she finishes school that's multiple hours a day pt ot speech while being hooked up to lights and lasers and one of them is like a vagus nerve stimulator that goes on her arm yeah so you know to help with cross-body integration and synapse i'm trying to get like her synapses to communicate with one you know you know all this better than i do but so clearly that's you know you're saying that this is like peak important right so what are we doing on a daily basis to activate our vagus nerve well most of us aren't doing much as i'm saying like what should we be doing like i hear i see like some girls on tiktok and be like i wake up every morning and I put like cold ice on my neck to like act, you know, like what are like, do you, are there things that you do or is Apollo enough, but are there things that you do on a daily basis to?

28:43Yeah, so most of us have fallen out of the habit of regular, healthy vagal stimulation. But we're not taught this. Yeah, we're not taught to prioritize it. So we're taught to prioritize productivity and performance. And productivity and performance are sympathetic activities. So in our society, that's about being alert, being highly energized and not really... particularly considerate of other people's emotions. Yeah, totally. Right? So that is a very like fight or flight nervous system dominant experience. When we're in that state for any reason, which could be too much news, too many responsibilities, too much screen time, big, big input for that.

29:21Or I got to get off my phone. I look at TikTok every night before I go to bed. And that decreases your REM and deep sleep. So you're not going to get... I'm not sleeping well right now. And I stay up late looking at TikTok. Like I get in bed at nine, but like I'll scroll till like midnight. Right. Yeah, no, you're not the only one. I just bought a brick. That thing that makes you like... Oh, that makes you turn your phone off? It makes you turn... You can't have access to the app unless you go and get the brick. Oh, no. Isn't that funny? We make those things, right? To help create boundaries. But a lot of it is just switching the behavior.

29:56The behavior change is much easier than we think it is. The problem is we're trying to change the behavior when we're already stressed. When we're stressed, like I was telling you earlier, when we're in that state of fight or flight, which comes from the phone itself, it's roughly 80 % of our blood flow is going to skeletal muscles. So think about that. So if we're at rest, and when we're at rest, 20 % of our blood flow is supposed to be going to skeletal muscles. The rest of the blood flow is distributed between the heart, the lungs, the brain, the kidneys and the liver, and then every recovery organ system, reproduction, digestion, immunity, metabolism, sleep, right?

30:36All those systems get all the blood they need at rest because the skeletal muscles only have 20 % because they're not needed to get us to survival. Okay. When we're under stress, real, actual survival threat or perceived TikTok-induced survival threat. Which your body still thinks is like a lion chasing it. Evolutionarily, the amygdala doesn't know the difference between social stimulus, social input threat or overstimulation and a lion. It's not able to distinguish that. It distinguishes new potential threat, uncertain potential threat, bright overstimulating potential threat. And that triggers the same exact blood flow response to the muscles.

31:14Because when we're in a, when the brain perceives that we're in a potentially threatening situation, there's only three options that we can take. Evolutionarily, we fight, we flee, or we freeze. Two of those require profound skeletal muscle activation. And the skeletal muscles require more blood than any other part of the body to fight or flee fully or we die in those actual survival threat situations. So if there's 80 % of our blood flow now going to the skeletal muscles all the time, that leaves, because we're chronically stressed. Then we're only getting 20 % to everything else. That means we're getting, but not even, we're getting 5 % of the brain required minimum, 5 % of the heart required, 5 % to the liver and kidneys required to make sure we don't go into kidney failure.

32:01That means there's 5 % left over for the entire rest of the body. 5 % that the body has to fight for. And so it's functioning. Every organ system is functioning in a completely resource depleted state, which is why you can't absorb or digest your food properly. It's why you don't have any libido and can't be fertile because your body can't divert any resources to reproduction when it's constantly stressed out. That's not what it wants to be thinking about. It's why we're irritable. It's why we can't sleep well. It's why we feel groggy and lack of energy in the morning. All of those symptoms are explained by those recovery and rest organ systems being resource depleted.

32:39So as soon as you feel Apollo or get a hug or hear your favorite song come on or take 30 to 60 seconds of deep, slow breathing by choice, you have in that 60-second time frame automatically redirected all your blood flow. Incredible. back to your recovery systems. So you're creating and able to witness like you witnessed when you felt Apollo kick in and you felt a shift. That shift is your body being like, oh, my skeletal muscles don't need all that blood anymore. Squeeze the vessels, decrease blood flow to skeletal muscles, push all that blood flow back to empathy, recovery, creativity, digestion, immunity, presence, focus, all the good stuff.

33:19And you can do that instantly. That's what monks have been teaching for thousands of years that we do not teach properly in Western culture. Well, yeah, if you explain it to anybody in those terms, which is it only takes you 30 seconds to redirect the blood to go exactly to where it needs to be for your own survival. And healing. And healing. For all healing functions in the body. All general happiness and overall health. Yeah. I mean, you would think that would be just as important as me drinking water all day long. For sure. Yeah. And I think people will start to realize it when we start to explain it better.

33:57The infertility thing makes me sad. But it's better than the alternative, right? It's better than everybody going in and finding out that they're actually infertile. Totally. Right? It's so much more hopeful if we know that most mental illness and most infertility and most IBS and digestive issues are due to chronic stress. I have so many hot girlfriends with IBS. It's our joke. It's always like, baby, you need a Xanax. There's nothing wrong with you. You're like, your stomach is like, you're just like kind of a mess and that's why you have IVF. Let's do the gut-brain connection. It's so real, you know.

34:30Right. And the gut is actually, in large part, how we discovered serotonin. Because the gut-brain axis is where, the gut-brain nervous system is where all of our serotonin for the brain, for the most part, is generated from food. And think about how serotonin, how important serotonin is for mood. Yeah. Right? And so if your gut is, if your mood is dysregulated, it will send signals to your and you're in a stress response state it will send signals to the gut that shuts down food absorption and gut behavior which makes it a not ideal place for your gut microbiome to function to get you all the serotonin you need from your food but also if you don't eat well then that can modulate your brain functioning and your mood so they go both ways which is really interesting the good news is you can do something about it and vagus nerve activity and doing any techniques that boost vagus nerve activity are really, really helpful and they work immediately.

35:22Immediately. Yeah.

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41:03How did you get into psychedelics? And was this like controversial amongst your peers? For sure. Yeah, this is, so I was... I got into psychedelic research and started to get tuned into it back in 2012. And is this from your own? Did you have an experience and you were like, oh, I should get into this? Not at that point. No, I had had subsequent experiences, particularly in training when we learned. I'm one of the few psychiatrists trained in MDMA and ketamine-assisted therapy. I've had a lot of friends who've done ketamine therapy that are different people. Yeah, it's incredible. or they're, I guess the way we would describe it is they're the best version of themselves that are whole, right?

41:45They're whole selves. But yeah, I think the, for me, it was really just looking at the data because I was seeing patients back in 2012 who were considered to be almost entirely falling into a category of what we call now treatment resistant mental illness. So think about all the people who get diagnosed with a mental illness. Those people who just have a regular diagnosis like major depression or PTSD or anxiety, they are people who have some degree of response to a treatment option, either therapy or a medication, the first one or two times they do it. Once you've failed two of those options, which is well over 30 to 40 % of people across all those diagnoses, you fall into a category called treatment resistant, which is a terrible name because they're not resisting.

42:31We gave up. Yeah, they're not resisting treatment. They really actually want to get better. But the treatments we have available are not working because they're stabilizing and numbing, but they're not like the Xanax is for your friend's IBS. It's numbing. It doesn't actually get to the root of the problem. The root of the problem is there's a nervous system imbalance. And so we need to figure out, well, what is at the core of the nervous system dysregulation? And it's oftentimes some kind of traumatic event. Could be something that was actually a survival threat or it could just be perceived threat.

43:04And it forces us to rethink trauma because trauma is not about how big the T is. It's about did something happen to you that changed the way you see yourself, right? How many people, in your research, how many people have you worked with that have this severe PTSD or trauma? I mean, are we talking like hundreds of people? Hundreds of people, yeah. I mean, those stories that you must have heard from other people. Maybe thousands, actually, over the years. I mean, it's been a long time. I think the probably hundreds in the very severe cases. But I think the way I got interested in psychedelics was because these people, when I started treating these people, they just weren't getting better.

43:50And no matter what we did, and we were doing everything by the book. And then I started talking to my colleagues who are also expertly trained people and my mentors who were senior to me. I'm like, are you guys seeing the same results? Like, are you having anything that works with these people? And most of them said no. A few of them told me, who are the older guard, were like, oh, you know, I use these hypnosis techniques I learned back in the 1920s, or I do like these things they learned way, way back that we don't teach anymore. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. Meditation seems to help.

44:21Mindfulness, breath work, somatic sensations. I wonder why that popped up in the 20s, but then never became a mainstay. Well, a lot of it was. And then when we developed SSRIs in the 70s and 80s, we had this dramatic shift. Rather than what's happening now, which is medicine plus therapy obviously is better. And the data now shows that. We went from completely Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis approaches, which are all intensive psychotherapy and meditation body type approaches and mind focused approaches to the biological psychiatry approach when SSRIs came about, which actually were developed at where I trained in Pittsburgh.

45:00the entire DSM was developed through University of Pittsburgh Medical Center for better or for worse. And so people are doing their best. I like to think everyone's intentions are. Yeah, generally speaking, I think. Yeah. And at the time, we didn't really know what worked best, but we knew that medications had some benefit, particularly for stabilizing complex patients. And we didn't know whether they worked in the long term or not. Now we know the medicine alone does not work in the long term, that people need the skills. They need the psychotherapy skills. They need the trauma processing and emotional skills to actually allow their body to re-regulate its vagus nerve and fight or flight system to facilitate healing.

45:43The medicine alone just numbs people to that effect. So I discovered psychedelics because one of my good friends and colleagues and other psychiatrists sent me 10 or 12 of the top publications that had come out in 2012, which was early. So most of the data that we cite today is since 2012. But back then, there were some of the first, most incredible publications that were coming out in world-renowned, peer-reviewed medical journals. So the same place I was reading all my other research. And she was like, you know, you should, with everything you're interested in, you'd be a really great psychiatrist and you should really read these papers.

46:17And so I started reading them. I stayed up all night reading these papers and I realized that psychedelic medicines were not only in the way they were being used in these studies. They were not only treating people with severe PTSD, just like my patients, like the same patients that I had that were, were treatment resistant. We're now with just one to three doses of medicine and therapy getting better for six to 12 months. And what is it? Is this a physical, like what's happening to make these changes? Well, I'll get to that in one sec. So the other part that's really interesting is that the medicines work at that time.

46:57And I found this since then, the medicines appeared to be working by inducing like a drug-induced dream state. I was like, oh my God, this is my entire interest going full circle, right? And I was like, okay, this is it. This is like, as soon as I had read all those papers, I was like, wow, this is how they think these are working. I can now drug-induce a dream state for a time-limited session and rewire somebody's brain and then I'm like, oh, okay, this makes perfect sense. So then to answer your question about how they work, after I started to get to read more and do more trainings and see the animal studies of how the brain rewires itself with psychedelics, each one works in slightly different ways, but they work surprisingly the same way basically to treat trauma, which is they amplify safety cascades in that insulate cortex, the emotional brain I was telling you about earlier that connects to the fear center of the amygdala.

47:47When the amygdala is overactive and in control, it's like your fear is driving the whole time. And in animal models, we call that fear learning, which in humans we call trauma. So your body has just learned fear. Of course that makes sense. Right? Yeah. And so the body learns things based on fear and safety. And it's the same in animals. And Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize for this. You probably heard of Pavlov's dogs and B.F. Skinner, right? Like they all studied this. for over 100 years. We've known most of this stuff. And then every 50 years or so, we get another major discovery that helps to provide more clarity.

48:21And Eric Handel's Nobel Prize when he worked in 2000 was the most recent work that was really incredible because he showed the entire learning mechanism for how we learn is the same as ancient sea snails going back 300 million years. Same hardwiring. Same hardwiring. Which means that when for us to extinguish fear, for us to explore or to heal from trauma. We have to relearn safety. And psychedelics work by amplifying safety learning and fear extinction all the way down to the insulin, the amygdala, those two core parts of the brain that are out of balance. When you provide a safe trusting interaction as the foundation for the healing experience with psychedelic, then you can add the psychedelic on and the medicine amplifies the safety of the trusting bond between the therapist and the patient.

49:10And then the person remembers, oh, this is what it feels like to trust again. Wiring. Meaningful wiring happens in those moments. And it records. And is this like a micro-dose-y situation? No, this is macro-dose. Or are we like, we're tripping? Yeah, this is macro-dose-y situation. You don't have to go all the way into like the spirit world. You know what I mean? We do what's called psycholytic dosing a lot of the time where we give people just enough to get them over the hump of their ego feeling like it can relax its grip a little bit. And how long is this? And obviously there's a therapist there and this is like a state.

49:41I mean, I've had a lot of friends who have done a lot of this stuff too, you know, so. Yeah. Yeah. The standard of care is, so we published a paper on this. Anybody can check it out. It's in the Journal of Effective Disorders 2023. And it's called Gold Standard Best Practices for Psychedelic Assisted Therapy. Well, if you want to find it, you can look at the board of medicine.org. It's our nonprofit. And we wanted to just summarize all the known evidence of how to deliver these therapies safely because it's known. and ketamine is the only legal psychedelic that's legal in every state and worldwide basically.

50:14And ketamine only lasts an hour. So it's not just at the clubs. Not just at the clubs. It was used long before at the clubs. It was used to evacuate wounded soldiers from the battlefield. Yeah, predominantly. And surgical anesthesia for pregnant women and children who don't tolerate propofol well. I forgot about that. And so it's been around for about 70 or 80 years. Very well studied. It has very few side effects from other medications. And it's extremely safe as far as anesthetics go. Is it synthetic? It's a derivative of... So it's semi-synthetic. It's synthetic in the way we use it because we make it in a lab.

50:49But I think it's originally found in tiny amounts in a mushroom. And it is a derivative of PCP in the lab. Oh, totally different than PCP experience. But it's a derivative of PCP. So that's how we discovered it. Can I tell you something that's interesting? And I am going to email this to you. My sister-in-law is an archaeologist and excavates in Roman Turkey. And one of the excavation sites that they had been working on was this long tunnel. And there was super cool. Yeah, it was this really cool long tunnel. And there were people that would stand at the top and like lean over and people who had mental.

51:28This is a back in ancient Rome, people who had mental health disorders. they would give them psychedelics and they would have to walk down this tunnel while doctors on top would whisper to them to rewire what was happening. So they were doing this in ancient Rome. And I should connect you with her or whatever this is so you can see what they discovered. And so, because it's so fucking cool and it's exactly what you guys are doing. Yeah. And my colleague, Brian Mureski, wrote the Immortality Kit. You've probably read that. Oh, yeah. I have it. I haven't read it because that's too much. I'm fucking TikTok.

52:00No, I know. it's also a fan it's people literally life has really diminished in the last few years with my so well that's that's the point right it's it's not that tiktok and social media and our phones are bad like almost all the great things that we do in our in society are enabled a lot of ways by smartphone technology it's just that we need to use it intentionally but like every like highly, highly intentionally, right? But smartphones are as addictive as cocaine, right? I'm way more addicted to my phone than I was to cocaine in my early 20s. That's my point. All day long, I'm like... But because it's so socially acceptable and available, and you get an immediate dopamine hit basically every time you open it up and use it when you get the what if it happens now, right?

52:49And so that, it's not that you get it, but most people don't acknowledge that they're using something that's that addictive and that it needs to be used very cautiously, carefully, intentionally. Well, we're not told that either, right? Right. And the companies deny it because it's not in the DSM. So in the book, I actually proposed for the first time that because the DSM only, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Mental Illness, they only update it every five to 10 years. It's crazy. It's not nearly enough to do a full update. So the social media companies are currently telling the press that we don't have to say anything about our technologies being addictive, even though they admit to designing them to be addictive for engagement.

53:32They don't have to admit it and that it could cause any health problems because the DSM hasn't said so. So I just put it in the book. Who's responsible for that? Well, I don't know. The guy, David Kupfer and his team who lead the DSM committee. but they trained me. So I figured they're probably going to read my book at some point. I just put it in there. I'm like, just in case you are lagging behind, social media addiction disorder and smartphone addiction disorder are real, are evidence-based and please make sure that they're in the next version. If they're not, you can use the definition here.

54:05Yeah, cool. Amazing. Can I ask you what it's been like to, number one, work with people who have this level of trauma because I cannot imagine the stories. Sure. I mean, you've heard some of the worst human experience. I mean, you know, it's like, not a lot of people are constantly hearing the deepest, darkest corners of what the human experience could be. True. And then coming out on the other side, like you've developed ways to solve the impossible, which are people that are basically told that there's nothing else you could do. Yeah. And by the way, when we talk about, when we even get into like daily life and politics and how communities function, mental health should be nothing but a priority because these are people that if not treated well become very dangerous and harmful to communities yeah not meaning to do so but you know when we see the politics going on in california right now with the mayoral race and everything like if spencer pratt out there unfortunately making a lot of fucking sense about the dangers of what and new york you know seeing these major cities where this is happening the mental health discussion is at the forefront of our political dialogue right now.

55:16It's our biggest challenge of society worldwide to overcome right now. There's like 360 people, 360 million people, at least, who are documented to have depression worldwide. 360 million people. If you look at the statistics in the US, just America, and you look at addiction, depression, and anxiety and PTSD, those four disorders, forget about all the other wild and crazy mental illness. You're looking at at least one in five people that are walking around with a diagnosis of severe, of some kind of like mental illness level that is likely preventing them from working full time or spending time with their family and functioning like a normal human being.

55:59That is a horrible statistic. So this is really like the epidemic of our times. And in addition to that, when it's even more of a sign that the Western medical system is struggling to address this burden because self-medication rates have gone up dramatically. Right? So what is the most common cause of accidental death in the U.S. right now? What is it? Opiates. Oh, yeah. Right? But that's more than, that's now surpassed like car accidents deaths every year. Right? It surpassed things that it should not be surpassing. And it doesn't, it affects everyone. Like I've had multiple physician colleagues who have accidentally overdosed on opiates.

56:38No. Yeah. yeah people who are amongst the because they're they're who knows why they were ended up consuming something that had narcotic in there or too much of it but the point is that my dad was popping oxys like it was no big deal he was a football player and had a lot of sports injuries and it was just and most people in our parents generation got those prescribed oh and then and then some and they never were told to stop and then all of a sudden somebody's like oh by the way i'm not going to write those prescriptions for you anymore good luck you know go find them somewhere else and And that's how a lot of people end up getting, start using illicit medicine and overdosing.

57:11But yeah, it's terrible. And when you really look at what's happening and the expense on a societal level, we're talking about like a billion, like hundreds of billions of dollars a year that gets spent on managing this crisis. Hundreds of billions. Yeah, hundreds of billions. Hundreds of billions. Every year managing this crisis. And so, and the crisis is a crisis of avoiding pain and discomfort. that's why people self-medicate right they're like i don't want to feel this bad anymore so i'm just going to have a drink or i'm just going to smoke or i'm just going to take this pill or whatever it is because it's easier and more familiar and it's societally acceptable to do but that's literally saying like saying if we're treating the emotional injury that person's had the trauma that made them not trust themselves anymore which is effectively trauma that decrease their vagus nerve activity.

58:03We're treating that like, not like a broken bone, like it is. Like we need to treat it like somebody came into the ER with a broken leg where you look at what happened, you clean the wound, you, you know, you abridge the edges, you sew it up and then it doesn't form a scar and you have a cast and a repair and an aftercare plan, right? And what we do is people come in weeks after, months after having a, or years after having a horrible traumatic event happen And they're like, I'm feeling like crap and here's why. And I'm not sleeping and my mood's terrible. And they're like, oh, here, just take this opiate, right?

58:39Take this SSRI for indefinitely. Don't worry about repairing what's underneath. You can do that if you feel like it. You don't say it's from with a broken leg. You don't say like, oh yeah, you can get a cast if you feel like it. We say you could lose your leg if you don't take care of this properly. Similarly, from an emotional wound, if we don't address it, like you could lose access to that part of yourself. Wow. Right? That part gets cut off because it gets associated with shame and guilt and we mentally amputate it so that it doesn't hurt so much and mess up the whole rest of the system. But it still does.

59:13So I think a lot of what we have to do and the biggest challenge that we're facing is just looking at changing our perspective and frame and looking at mental illness as if the mind and the body are connected and it is organic physical illness. it's not separate yeah right like the fact that we look at it separately we reimburse it separately we treat it completely separately is totally ridiculous and that's what causes a lot of the problems is this illusion of separation so we just need to look at it all together and find the common ground and apollo in part is was our way of helping to bridge that gap because it's like oh by the way nobody ever thought that you could we knew that we know everybody knows that music makes you feel good everybody knows that hugs make you feel good but nobody knew that you could use technology to take benefits of soothing touch composed with music and deliver them to the skin and start to address some of the most common symptoms of mental illness or just chronic stress and burnout which are physical symptoms and mental symptoms that are addressed through wearable technology that's healing with physics instead of chemistry oh right yeah like no no drugs no side effects no risk of using it with anything else you can use as much as you want and it gives you like 50 % of the safety effect of MDMA.

1:00:26Are you, wow, 50 %? Of the safety, not of the psychedelic. Yeah, no, of course. Of the safety. Yeah, that's how we developed it was studying the MDMA neural pathways and replicating its effect with sound. What psychedelics have you done? Most of what I've done has been in the context of training. Yeah, of course, of course. I led a research trip to Peru in 2017 prior to some of the work we were doing to understand how the indigenous people use ayahuasca for healing. in the Shipibo culture. So that was actually working with the lineage trained shamans in the Shipibo culture who have been, are so interesting because they're a continuous lineage.

1:01:01So it's like thousands of years of the same people passing down oral tradition around plant medicine. So you're getting it like the way they've been doing it for a really long time and the same kinds of songs that they sing and what they call Icaros. And I mean, it was just incredible experience. Did you do it? I did. And it was scary. Yeah, I'm too scared. But it was, I mean, we prepared. Like we did it. We prepared the way they told us, like the way that they've been doing it thousands of years, the dieta, the weeks before of abstaining from sugar, salt, high fat content foods, no processed food, no sex, no drugs, no anything.

1:01:37And then afterwards, there's another diet that you do. And it was an incredibly powerful experience. I think for me, it was easily one of the most meaningful, powerful experiences of my life because it reaffirmed that. I mean, basically, when I went down there, I was starting to really invest heavily in my time in the work into Apollo, into developing Apollo. I wasn't sure it was worth my time, but I felt like it was. I thought it was working. I thought that my theories around what I had learned around safety and fear and learning and epigenetics and all this stuff was correct, but I didn't know for sure.

1:02:14And so when I went in... You were having a moment of self-doubt. I mean, as a scientist, yeah. like we're just trained we all hit that moment we were like are we doing the right fucking thing exactly and needed some answers and yeah and i didn't have a lot of people jumping on on the bandwagon other than my research crew that i brought together who were like oh yeah this is really cool yeah those are your yes people so you're like yeah yeah so i was so i i asked i asked ayahuasca in the session you know and i said you know am i on the right track is is what i'm doing what i'm supposed to be doing and am i like following the pulling the right threads and the answer was like two thumbs up unanimously yes undeniably yes keep going keep going and i was like oh that was not ambiguous you know what i mean that was not like something i could have been like oh well maybe it was maybe yes or it was like something i made up like i didn't make it up and it didn't come from within me it came from the way that drives this is like not come from your subconscious this is like uh i mean the way i mean we probably a longer conversation but the way that they describe it is that there's an interaction between us and the consciousness of the plants and we're all part of the same consciousness.

1:03:21Yeah, great. But that we're different expressions of that consciousness that can interact within it. Almost like it's a mentor. Exactly. That's what they call it, a master plant. So the plants are teachers to us in their culture. And the way they treat trauma is so fascinating because they use the plants to treat trauma and they believe that what they're changing is something to do with these two interlocking serpent-like lines, right? That look just like a double helix. And that's where we store our trauma as we're finding in modern Western psychiatry on the DNA. No way. It's so crazy. It's so beautiful.

1:04:00Right? Yes. Full circle. Everything comes around. And yeah, so Western science is now showing that this is the case that we store trauma on our DNA and the indigenous cultures have drawn DNA in one way or another for thousands of years as the source of all life and knowledge and healing. And so that was like a really unifying experience for me. And then I did my ketamine training and my MDMA training. And ketamine in particular was a very profound medicine because it's so synthetic in the Western approach. It's amazingly safe. It only lasts an hour. But what was so interesting to me is how similar it was to what I experienced with ayahuasca, but I wasn't in the jungle and I wasn't in presence of the singing shaman.

1:04:42Yeah, so you were like, okay, this is something that we can clearly be doing here. Yeah, it was guided by a soundtrack and I had a blindfold on and a group of other, of other doc, 26 other doctors, right? And so I still had the ceremony component, but I didn't have any of the other stuff and it still was incredibly profound and very much like me able, allowing me to like just observe and witness myself without judgment. with a quiet observer mind. And I was like, wow, we spend decades teaching people with psychoanalysis how to get to observer mind. And this just did it with an injection. Oh, it's an injection.

1:05:17Yeah, injection IV, oral, there's lots of ways to do it, nasal spray. The injection is probably the best. So those kinds of experiences for me, and I really do believe in this path of the history of medicine where we all tried our medicines before we gave them to patients because it helps you explain it better. but I think we're getting back there which is good can you just quickly while as we wrap up like what was the genesis of a simple guide to being alive I mean clearly you've been how long have you been doing this work about 20 years I think about you were ready to give the world all your knowledge yeah I mean I think about I think when I went and did my MAPS training in 2016 right before we went to Peru and I realized in the MDMA training that safety was the core of the training, that everything was based on that foundation of safety.

1:06:07And then I had already had my Western psychiatric psychotherapy training. So that was all based on safety also, even though we don't talk about that much in the Western context. It's founded in safety. Then did the MDMA therapy session. It was training totally based on safety. Then read all the clinical trials and MDMA and animals and how they work. And it was reprogramming safety circuitry in the autonomic nervous system between the fight or flight system and the parasympathetic system, just like BF Skinner talked about, just like Pavlov talked about 100 years before. And I'm thinking to myself, and I swear, why the fuck don't we teach this stuff?

1:06:43This is so simple. Like, the way that the system's actually working is known. Like, if MDMA is working this way, and soothing touch works this way, and soothing music works this way, why is it so hard for us to explain to somebody why it's healthy and important to get more hugs? And not just important, but essential. right? Like we need more vagus nerve activity, boosting, getting more hugs is the number one, fastest immediate way to do it. Soothing stimulation, listening to music you like all the time. Soothing in general is as important as productivity. If we don't balance our productivity or our work output, our yang with our yin, right?

1:07:22If we don't balance productivity with receiving, we run out of fuel. It's common sense. Yeah, of course. Nervous system works that way. It's funny because you see it in kids. Like I read somewhere that it takes six seconds longer for little boys to get a hit of oxytocin from a hug than it does for little girls. I haven't seen that, but that could be true. Yeah. Six seconds is still not that long. No, not. But I was like, or it takes double the time or like something that it was like, it takes them longer to make whatever. And so, and I read that to my husband one night. And so we hug our, we always make sure to like over hug our son.

1:07:58because then I, whatever study I was reading then also said that a lack of oxytocin and serotonin in little boys when they're younger creates like angry adult. And so I just thought to myself like - Certainly can. And it made me think of like how many little kids, how we're not taught that, how we're not taught as parents to love up on your child and make them feel safe in that way. Yeah. And to have that be their foundation. You're right. We teach them, we got to go to school and you got to get your grades and you got to do this. Discipline. And discipline and all this stuff. And we don't teach them that level of, I mean, I come from a very loving, touching family, so we're good.

1:08:40But it broke my heart thinking about all the other children that don't have that. And you can see it in fucking fucked up adults where they had these really strict parents and they had this thing and they're just kind of spracking out a little bit because they don't have that. They don't know how to do that. You know? Absolutely. And look at the cultures that live the longest, happiest, healthiest lives, right? Sardinia and parts of Italy, right? Where they are touching all the time. They are making eye contact all the time. In fact, their entire culture when you go and spend time there is about this and connection.

1:09:09And every meal is like a lengthy, except breakfast is a lengthy meal because you're spending time connecting with other people over your sensory experience of the delicious food you're eating. That's my favorite chapter in Outliers too. it was like scientifically these people were living longer they were smoking they were drinking but they were living longer than anybody else that group of italians that had immigrated to whatever town it was ross something with an r because the out they the one thing that made them outliers was that they were a community exactly and that's that's a big part of what i also talk about in the book is how poorly that's taught and how community and unity as a as a species is one of our best in terms of like how do you accelerate waste removal in the body right?

1:09:52That's one of our best ways to increase antioxidant production and decrease inflammation, accelerate waste removal from the body. There's all these things we can do ourselves. We're doing all of those things, right? Many of us are doing the breathing and the exercise and the yoga and we're doing the routines, right? But we're not getting all the way there because we're missing connection. And connection is free and it's always there. You can get it by literally just smiling at somebody walking past you on the street. I feel so good to smile at somebody or let somebody in or open a door for someone.

1:10:22And you don't need to be a conversation. You just smile and acknowledge them as fellow human beings. And that's enough because they're going to do the same for you. Maybe not everyone, but many people will start doing the same for you. And then you'll just feel better because you'll feel less alone because the body recognizes connection before separation. It's just what is it seeing first, right? Is separation what we notice first? Is difference what we notice first? Or is it sameness and connection we notice first? Whatever we notice first sets the tone to the nervous system. This is incredible.

1:10:53What a great, thank you so much. This has been fascinating and beautiful. And I like literally can't wait to go home and tell my like mom and husband about this. And where can people buy the book? When does it come out? Book comes out on June 16th. Okay. Probably right around the time that this comes out. You can go to, you can find the book at a simple guide to being alive.com. Amazing. Made it really easy. I figured, you know, my patients have been asking me these questions forever. And many of my patients also don't have like high school or college educations. And I have to always figure out, like, how do I explain this better?

1:11:24So that in metaphor, how do I explain this so that anyone can understand it? And over the years of having patients of all different levels, I realized that I just can't see that many people, enough people to make a difference. I need to put this out into the world. And so I'm going to put into a book and see what happens. God bless you. Good for you. You're really doing like such important work for all of us, for the human. I mean, truly, like, I like hawk shit on Instagram. Thank you so much. This is absolutely fucking incredible. Thank you. It's my pleasure. Of course. Hopefully we can hawk some shit that heals some people.

1:11:58Yeah, exactly.

1:12:18on Instagram at Pia Barancini. And I hope you have a fabulous, fabulous rest of your day. Love you. Ciao.

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