What We Learned About the Brain in 2025 | Stress, Perception & Healing

0:00Hello, welcome to the final episode of 2025. We have squeezed one more in for you on New Year's Eve. Whatever year you've had, I hope that this podcast can help support you into 2026. And I was thinking about what we would do today for part two, and I really wanted to focus on something that I think is so important, especially going into next year, which is our mindset, our mental health, psychology, everything to do with our brain health. And to do that, I've looked back at this year to see which ones you loved the most in this sector and which ones meant the most to me. So we're going to kick off with thought leader Simon Sinek.

0:37We're going to talk to neuroscientist Dr. Sarah McKay. Especially if you're a woman, you should listen to this episode and these reflections. Then we speak to Professor Dan Nicolau, probably one of my favourite episodes of this year. He's a neuropsychoimmunologist. It's a lot. He looks at the brain and the immune system. We then speak to the godfather of psychedelics, Rick Doblin, and we end with the master himself, Robin Schwama. This episode hopefully is inspiring. It will give you loads of amazing takeaways from neuroscience to personal growth, all the things I am loving at the moment. And hopefully this just gives you a little bit of support thinking about 2025 going into 2026.

1:19Thank you once again for being part of this community this year and get ready for my first solo episode to come next week. Happy New Year everyone, wishing you the best end to 2025. Hey guys, I am very bad at asking for this but I wanted to stop for just one minute and ask a huge favour. If you want to hear more diverse conversations from female voices such as myself, I would love if you could hit subscribe. We work so hard on this show to bring you some of the best guests in the world. And having a female voice sometimes gives a different perspective. And I really want to elevate more of that on this channel.

1:56So please hit subscribe if that's important to you as it is to me.

2:05People might have this perception of you where you, you know, when you said, I actually didn't realize I'd ever think I'd be doing this. Standing on stage so eloquently with such autonomy, inspiring so many people, it just comes at complete ease. You sitting here talking comes at complete ease. This is what you're naturally good at. But people might be quite surprised to know that you're also quite introverted. How have you navigated those qualities? I think that's something that many people talk about, but I actually think it's something maybe really important to highlight.

2:35Simon Sinek:They're completely different things. So a friend of mine invited me to a Christmas party at her at her flat and I said, no.

2:47Simon Sinek:And I went to her Christmas party the year before and I hated it. I think I stayed 15 minutes. And then you left. And I left. I hated every second of it. And so she asked me to come the following year and I said, I love you, but I'm going to pass. And she said, why? I said, it's the introvert in me. It's really uncomfortable. I mean, I can force myself to do it, but if I don't have to do it, then I'll choose not to do it. And I don't have to do this, right? And she was very aggressive. She sort of said, I don't believe you. I don't believe you that it's your introversion, that you don't want to come to the party.

3:25Simon Sinek:She says, I see what you do. You stand on stage for a living. How can you call yourself an introvert? Because she thought I was lying to her. And they're completely different things, right? I don't know how to make small talk. I don't know how to work a room. I don't know how to do any of that, right? I'm very good one-on-one. I'm great one-on-one. I love an individual conversation. I love the company of one or just a very few. I don't even like the company of 10 people that I know, you know? I'm usually very quiet. It's like I love watching my friends sort of get to know each other. That's the best.

4:00Simon Sinek:I don't mind that I enjoy, but I just stay out of it. And when I'm on stage, I'm having one conversation with one person because I look one person in the eye and I talk to them. And I talk to one person and talk to them. I'm having a lot of individual conversations, which is why I'm a good public speaker, because I'm not attempting to hold court. I don't like holding court. I don't want to hold court. I don't pan and scan and look around the audience and think that I'm... No, I'm talking to one person at a time, which is why I always request for the house lights to be up so I can see the people, so I can have one conversation at a time.

4:32Simon Sinek:So what makes me a very, very effective public speaker is that I am an introvert. And people are very surprised because before or after the big event, I'm just sort of, you know, a little awkward or quiet. Or sometimes I'm in a great mood and I'm jacked up on caffeine and I'm having a good time. And then I have a bigger, larger than life personality. It's not like I'm always, I think, and this is the other thing. I think people confuse social awkwardness and introversion. You can be a socially awkward introvert and you can be a socially awkward extrovert. Like there are extroverts who derive energy from people, but you're like, dude, too much.

5:07Simon Sinek:That's socially awkward extroversion, right? I'm a socially functional introvert who is sometimes socially awkward, right? But I can, my personality is big and people think I'm extroverted and all of that can come out, but it is exhausting when it happens. Like I'll have fun and I beat big personality and I go home and I am done. I sit in the back of the car and I'm like, oh, I need sugar. You know? I'm exhausted. How do you navigate that with your career, though? Because half of your career is being on stage, is surrounded by a lot of people. Yeah. How do you navigate that? I don't go out for dinner afterwards.

5:46Simon Sinek:Like, I always get invited, come out with the team for dinner. No. No, that's just more work. I went from working to doing more work. For other people, that's the time they get to relax and let their hair down. For me, that's more work. So how do you relax? I'm a homebody. I love staying at home. I love puttering around the house. I love little silly projects, fixing things, making things, building things. I do Lego like it's going out of style. I mean,

6:20Simon Sinek:I putter. I love companionship. I love the company of a person. I love sitting next to somebody watching TV. I love it. And it's not antisocial. It's unsocial. I'm not antisocial. I'm very, very social. I'm just unsocial, meaning I like the company of a few a lot. And going out is great. I'm a foodie. I love going to restaurants. But it is always exhausting. and that's okay i know this about myself and sometimes i have the energy and sometimes i don't and i'm gotten better about saying i don't have the energy like communicating this yeah like going out for dinner are we gonna go out for dinner tonight i will but if you really don't if you don't mind i'd rather stay home if you want to go i'm in because it's all there's also i'm also not the only person in the world and i like to make sure that others are taken care of and I can rally if I need to.

7:24Simon Sinek:But I'm just better at vocalizing it. Again, practice, practice. That's all it is. And compromises, you know? Practices and compromises is all it is. How do you, I mean, I feel like you've gone through a lot of kind of self-growth, how easy you are to kind of start communicating your needs outwardly. Some don't like it. Maybe that's just more about them. Some people would rather I keep it to myself. It's not always a blessing. Yeah, but I think it's actually worse if you can't. Because you rattle people up the wrong way and they can't understand you. It's circumstantial. Yeah, I think... Nothing is...

8:01Simon Sinek:It's like what I said before, everything comes at a cost. Everything comes at a cost. And you have to weigh the costs, always. And sometimes the costs are worse, and sometimes they're not. Right? So, I mean, we have to get away from this right, wrong, good, bad. There's no such thing as right and wrong. There's no such thing as good and bad. everything is about cost. What's the cost of the thing that you want? That's it, right? There's the right way to build your career. There's the right way to do this. There's the right way to lead. No, there isn't. They're just different cost structures. And for some people, this cost is worth it.

8:33Simon Sinek:And for some people, this cost is not worth it, right? I mean, take a silly example. You know, some people devote themselves so intensely to their career. some of them may not have a relationship with their kids. And in the moment, they may think it's worth the cost. Later on, they might reevaluate them and be like, shit, not worth it. But the point is, there's costs. And I think what I've gotten good at over the years is not believing... I'm completely limited to the concept of right, wrong, good, bad. Right? In myself as well, there's no such thing as strengths and weaknesses. I fundamentally don't believe we have strengths and weaknesses.

9:09Simon Sinek:We have attributes and characteristics. And in some circumstances, those attributes and characteristics will manifest as a strength. And in some circumstances, they will manifest as weaknesses. But they're not in themselves strengths or weaknesses. It's just the way you are. So let's talk about my forwardness and bluntness about some things. In some circumstances, with some people, it's a boon. In other circumstances, not so much. Right? And so I have to learn to modulate those things or modulate where I am. I'll give you a really funny one. I'm very disorganized. People don't know that, but they don't expect it, but I'm very disorganized.

9:47Simon Sinek:Right? Is that a strength or a weakness? Is that a strength or a weakness? Now, most people would be like, oh, it's a weakness. Is it though? I don't know. Maybe it's circumstantial. Right? So if I have a lot to get done and I'm not good at keeping it all organized, some things absolutely fall through the cracks. I am notorious with being like, I have to do that. And literally a minute later, forgetting to do it. Like literally people like, I just told you, I'm like, I know I forgot. They're like, how can you forget? It was literally one minute ago. I'm like, I know I forgot ADHD. I mean, it's not an excuse.

10:17Simon Sinek:It's it. I didn't write it down. I forgot. You're like, you know, so being disorganized, bad, bad. Okay. And I'll take another example. I went to this networking event when I was young in my career. Met this guy. He's like, your stuff's amazing. I would love to work with you. Here's my card. Be in touch. I'm like, great. Fantastic. Of course, I lost the business card almost immediately. So if I was organized, I'd be, you know, texting from the taxi on the way home or emailing the next day to make contact. Not me. I lost the business card, lost the opportunity, gone. Two weeks later, I found the business card.

10:55Simon Sinek:Happened to be at the bottom of a bag somewhere. So I emailed the guy. I'm like, I don't know if you remember me. Two weeks ago, we met. I wanted to see if he was someone to work together. He wanted to work with me even more because he thought I was busy. So is being disorganized a strength or a weakness? Depends. It depends. So I know that I have these attributes and these characteristics, and I work very hard to figure out where those things will show up as strengths and then make sure to put myself in those situations more than the other situations.

11:28I started MAPS because I felt like it was through science. And basically, it's to go where the suffering is, that people will listen when they're suffering. Other times, they might not listen. So that if we can go to try and make MDMA into a medicine to cure certain kinds of suffering. And then the other big issue was, well, it was a strategic sense. Of all the psychedelics, which would I pick? It was MDMA. And then what should it be for? and at the time we needed sympathetic patients so the main um there was a lot of people from vietnam who had ptsd this is now quite a while 86 now but there were still a lot of people from vietnam that had ptsd that had not been treated so we needed sympathetic patients we needed a disease that was potentially causing suicide that would be very expensive that would lead as you're saying with the stress to lead to all sorts of physical illnesses that was expensive and I had worked with a woman in 1984 who had PTSD and saw it helped.

12:29So MDMA for PTSD became the vehicle to go through the FDA. I think that's something where I've become really aware of, that there is no treatment legally, I'll put that in, for PTSD. And I think people now still go to the doctors with PTSD and they're prescribed SSRIs, which doesn't work. Yeah, there was an incredible image of, this was an image of a soldier who was like wading through a river and carrying his gun so it wouldn't get wet, but the river was filled with pills. He was wading through SSRIs because that's all the VA was giving, and it wasn't really helping. No. Yeah. How does MDMA work with the brain and PTSD?

13:14Ah, okay. This is an easy one. All right. So the first step is, how does PTSD change your brain? So PTSD is this post-traumatic stress disorder. People are fearful very much of whatever happened before is not really in the past. It's going to happen again. and so your amygdala the part of your brain that is more processing fear is hyperactive there's more activity in the in the amygdala for people that have ptsd than than average normal people the other thing about ptsd is that it's hard to separate out what's real threat what's not if you you know people are always triggered by different things so there's less activity in the prefrontal cortex where we think logically so you're sort of short-circuited by your emotions so you see somebody that looks like somebody that assaulted you and now you feel like you're about to be assaulted again if you had a moment to think about it it's a whole different person it's a different context it's not that and then these traumatic memories are never really put into the past and so the hippocampus which is the part of our brain that stores memories into long-term storage there's lower activity in the hippocampus and less connectivity between the amygdala and hippocampus when you have ptsd right so that's kind of how your brain changes and you've got these real circuits that are activating all the time so mdma works great for ptsd but we found later that or not we other people found we felt that if we focus on the healing other people will do the neuroscience so what we know is that mdma reduces activity in the amygdala so that when you are remembering a traumatic memory it's not as fearful mdma increases activity in the prefrontal cortex so you're able to sort of think logically more so and then mdma increases connectivity between the hippocampus and the amygdala so that you're able to process memories and put them into long-term storage then the other big part of what it does is oxytocin so the hormone of love and connection of self-compassion of self-love yeah my favorite one yeah so mdma releases oxytocin and there's a woman gul dolan a neuroscientist who has done studies that show that in mice that the oxytocin is released by mdma and that's what promotes neuroplasticity and that's what we really need with ptsd is that we need to create more of these neural highways and kind of shunt them off from the trauma loop and create new neural highways.

15:54So we're having new processing methods, right? Yeah, you definitely can have one session where you rewire your brain and then if you do the therapy. Now, I should add though that, for example, this woman that I worked with in 1984 who had PTSD, MDMA, by reducing this fear response to traumatic memories can be destabilizing as well as healing. so she initially did it with a friend of hers and memories of past sexual abuse came up and it so destabilized her she'd previously attempted suicide she'd been medicated she'd been hospitalized from this trauma and under mdma even in a safe place relatively with a lover these memories came up and she felt that they were overwhelming so she checked herself into a hospital not to kill herself and while she was there they stabilized her but they gave her the same SSRI stuff that she'd had before whatever medicine she didn't think it would work so she was more so subtle when she got out so I I don't want people to think you take MDMA and now all of your problems you can deal with if you're not in a safe therapeutic setting you you can trigger traumatic memories and then they can be overwhelming so it's the context more than the drug that is what produces the healing.

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18:56what is the one that like really stands out to you the most that you really hold dear to you of all the lessons that you wrote on the eight healthy habits on the eight forms of wealth i would say um maybe the chapter about going ghost for a year so many people have have commented on that. And the idea is basically, if you look at the most creative, productive people, they all have a retreat, whether it's the stacks in a public library or whether it's a seaside cottage like Goldeneye, which was where Ian Fleming, who created the James Bond books, he would just go to get away from the world. But I think it's really important to go ghost on a regular basis.

19:37Ideally, if you can, go ghost for a year. Go to Bali or go to Colombia or take your family on a sailing adventure. If you can't go ghost for a year, go ghost for a month. And if you can't go ghost for a month, then do it even for a weekend. But I think it's really important to get away from the noise so you can hear the signal. I think our greatest insights, and there's a lot of entrepreneurs who watch your show, When I work with my clients, one of the things I help them do is on their schedule, institutionalize strategic refueling. Because so many people work hard because they think it's going to make them more productive.

20:20That comes from the factory era, where if we're at a factory and we produced more, we would be more productive. We're now in the cognitive era. And so if we are depleted and if we are exhausted and if we have lost our inspiration because pretty much all we do is work, we're not going to get the billion dollar ideas that help a billion people. So spending more time going ghost I think is a very powerful idea. That connects a lot to your rest comment that you mentioned in the five questions, right? Is getting the rest and the recovery. but if someone's looking at their diary and whether it's somebody who is like an extremely busy mom or an entrepreneur running a very high scale company how can that person actually like know that prioritizing that is going to increase to a better outcome better productivity being a better mom whatever it is because I do think it's so hard that sometimes when you feel like life is toppling on top of you to make these decisions say well actually I'm just not gonna go to that or I'm actually just not going to turn up to that thing.

21:21It's so hard to actually inject that into your life and be aware of it, but also enforce it. How can we do that to actually say no to the things that we feel we should be saying yes to? Well, a few ways I would answer that. First of all, there are a lot of workaholics in the world right now. And there's a lot of people whose self-worth is tied to their self-identity in the world. Absolutely. And so if your identity is attached to, I'm a business builder, then if you're not building your business, you don't have any self-identity, so you're going to be a work addict. if you don't like yourself very much or you're full of wounding and undeservability issues, then you're not going to prioritize self-care and wellness and fitness and stillness and meditation because your identity is tied to you working.

22:20A lot of people, you know this, they use overwork as a badge of honor. So that'd be the first thing I'd say. Second thing is just look at the science. look at the science the work of the energy project look at what's the what's the energy project the energy project has found for example that the most productive people are much more like sprinters versus like marathoners and the the most productive people work in bursts of intense activity and then they pull back and recover and then if you study the great lives many of the great lives. We're here in London, Winston Churchill, I mean, he had a very full plate, to put it mildly, especially in World War II.

23:01But almost every weekend, he would have one car in front of him with his security person with a revolver as his protection. And into the night, they would race out to Checkers, his country retreat. And he'd spend the whole weekend smoking cigars in the Rose Garden, taking long walks, staying up till two after midnight, drinking and eating for recovery. Now, I'm not saying you have to drink and eat. What I'm saying is he had a retreat. And if you look at a lot of the great creative people, they had places they would go to to rest and to recover. I'm interrupting for one moment to ask one small favor.

23:41Please subscribe to the show. This helps it grow more than you know. And I'm so bad at asking this from you. I'm so bad at thinking about this. but you know my goal is 100 ,000 to get to on YouTube and I really want to bring you more content and better guests and bigger episodes and we can only do that with your help together so please do hit subscribe thank you

24:09when we're thinking about what you're looking at for instance what is it that you're looking to find through your three hypotheses that you're exploring? Thank you for the question. So pretty simple actually, almost something you could explain to, well I think I could probably explain to my four-year-old. So if you, hypothesis one, social media use in some contexts at some levels causes inflammation. Causes in the sense that of course you have other things that are causing inflammation and other things that are reducing inflammation, like antioxidants, but causes in the sense that if you get rid of it, your inflammation will get better.

24:49And if you bring it back, your inflammation will get worse again. And you're going to look at that through CRP level? There is some evidence. Yeah, CRP is a course marker of inflammation, as you know, because you're a biochemist. There is some evidence now, yes, that I can talk about, that the more social media you you self-report that you use, the more, of course, inflammatory markers are up six weeks down the line. Hypothesis one. Hypothesis two, specific content causes it. Socially stressful content, like violence, like shouting, like hate speech, bad things. I use the word bad very loosely, but I think you know what I mean.

25:27And I think everybody does know what I mean by bad. Yeah, they're not looking at puppies. They're not looking at butterfly, like mating cycles. Yeah. That's hypothesis two. That specific, socially stressful content causes these changes, and not just all content, like not if you're looking at videos of sunsets or whatever. Hypothesis three, independent of social media, people who do content moderation, people whose job it is to filter out bad things so that we don't see them will have higher inflammatory markers than match controls. People who are very similar to them but just don't do content moderation for a job.

26:02We know that those people who do content moderation for a job have terrible health outcomes. many of them commit suicide, many more attempt suicide, they have depression, they have anxiety, they have all sorts of problems. And indeed, why would you expect anything different? If your job is to watch horrible, violent or sexual assault videos that no one else does, of course, you're going to be affected. So I think it's very difficult to imagine that last hypothesis not turning out to be correct. Nonetheless, we do need to do the work, as always in science. I wrote this down so I didn't forget. I'm thinking about my nephew who loves gaming.

26:32it can be quite aggressive. I mean, obviously there's not like people, but you're literally going around with guns, right? Killing people. Would that cause inflammation? Is that the type of like negative kind of usage that we would also kind of put that under? Because I'm thinking gaming is huge now. Gaming is huge. Two things that have been well studied previously are gaming and pornography. And they have been studied very well respectively in South Korea and Australia. And the research there is good. The evidence base is very thorough. And in both cases, there is basically at inappropriate levels.

27:11They both cause all sorts of problems, including mental health, but also inflammatory states. social media has not been studied, which is sort of surprising. And when it has been studied, people have looked at screen time. There is no obvious reason, and they've concluded that there's very little evidence, but there's no reason to think, there's no sensible reason to think that simply screen time itself would give you problems. It depends what you're watching. I would think virtually everybody would agree with that statement. It's likely that the content is doing things to you, if anything, right?