#987 - Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett - The New Science Of Emotions, Anxiety & Brain Health

33:46But I would have assumed that newer experiences would have overwritten older experiences, that this thing that we've done a couple of times most recently, I've been in a small space and it was okay. Why does that not get rid of claustrophobia, let's say, that I had previously. Yeah, so surprisingly, that's not how it works. and the evidence suggests that the original meaning and the new meaning are both there, but you never lose the old meaning. And it can be reinstated really easily. So the only way to get rid of an old meaning is to lose the neurons that that manifested. You know, there's an interesting scientific, I think that's an interesting scientific kind of story about this that a number of years ago, like decades, maybe I don't know, 40, 50 years ago, maybe more now.

34:54Some guy in Rockefeller University in New York was studying why it is that songbirds, the size of the clusters of neurons in their brains called the song nuclei. So a nucleus is just like a clump of neurons that work together. In songbirds, these nuclei grow in size. They like new neurons are there at some parts of the year and then they get smaller to the parts of the year And this scientist was like super interested in like how's what is this what is this about? This was the birth of the science of plasticity He discovered that brains can birth new neurons And then it was discovered that other animals can do it and even humans can do it But humans can only do it in some parts of the brain in exactly I think one part There's some evidence, maybe two, but one part of the brain called the hippocampus can burst new neurons.

35:57And then people start asking the question, well, why, how did this happen that, you know, the hippocampus can burst new neurons, but they were asking the wrong question. Because it turns out that invertebrates, most animals, both vertebrates, can, they burst new neurons all over the brain, humans have lost that capacity. We've only retained it in one part of the brain, but it's been lost everywhere else. And like, why would that be? And the one potential answer that scientists think about is that we are long -lived. And when if you replace one neuron with another neuron, you've lost the memories that that neuron participated in or you lose part of the memory that the neuron participated.

36:52What is a memory? A memory isn't like a file. It's a pattern of electrical and chemical and maybe magnetic, we don't know, but definitely electrical and chemical activity that is remanifesting itself. So memories aren't, you know, retrieved, even though that's the word we use. They're not really retrieved like you would retrieve a file from a file drawer. They are reconstituted, re -implemented. They are constructed, reconstructed, patterns of electrical activity with electrical, electrical chemical activity. And if you lose the neurons that are part of the, I mean, a given memory doesn't just have one neuron.

37:36It doesn't just have one, you know, one assembly of neurons. There are neurons that are constantly switching out to maintain the memory.

37:51Like, I don't know, like players on a baseball team or something. They're constantly switching out. But if you lose some of those, the memory is lost. So we don't lose our memories. We remember things for 50, 60, 70, 80s, 90 years, right? So we, and we have a limited capacity for memory, meaning at some point, and this is something that, you know, scientists now talk about, like maybe our inability to remember things as we get much older is because like we're getting filled up because we don't have new neurons, there's no place for those memories to go, essentially. There's no new neurons that are freed up.

38:40So one neuron doesn't participate in one memory. It can participate in hundreds or thousands of memory because it's in a larger ensemble that create the memory. But the limited nature of our memories, or, well, let's put this way, the expansive nature of our memories comes from the fact that we keep our neurons for really long, and we're long time and we don't birth new ones in most places in the brain. But that also puts a limit on what we can remember as we age. I remember seeing something written a while ago about there is no such thing as sort of getting rid of myelin sheets that have been laid down.

39:25You can simply lay down ones that are more or easy to access more commonly accessed over the top. So basically, there's no such thing as not driving a habit. There is simply choosing between which habit you want to drive here or which one you want to incur. Yeah, I mean, how much truth is in that? Well, yeah, I mean, there is some truth in what you're saying, but it's the devil's in the details, right? So first of all, a mile in sheath is the fatty sheath that goes around the axon, it's not responsible for content of your experience. It's responsible for transmission speed. So if you have an axon that is well wrapped, so an axon, does everyone who, I mean, you don't know what everyone who listens to this knows, but an axon is a, like a protrusion from the cell body of a neuron that carries an electrical signal that is part of how neurons talk to each other and create, you know, your movements and your lived experience.

40:35The speed with which the electrical signal moves down the axon is directly related to the thickness of the neuron and the amount of myelin on the neuron that wraps it for like conductive purposes. It's also, there are other things which affect transmission speed too that aren't the mile in, like there are glial cells, other cells that wrap themselves around the junctures between where neurons talk to each other called the synapse. And that also affects the transmission speed of signaling. But the point being that you can lose myelin, that happens. For example, in intractable depression, the myelin starts on certain tracks in your brain, certain groups of axons, lose some of their myelination and when you do deep brain stimulation that grows the myelon back.

41:46That's partly why that treatment is really useful. But it is the case that once you have a memory, If you've consolidated that memory, which means that your neurons have grown new little receptors that are important for making an ensemble of signals that is the memory, if you've consolidated that memory, you will have a hard time unremembering it unless there is physical change to your neurons. What would that be? Dementia, like you lose neurons. Spike through the head. Spike through the head, yeah. However, if you can prevent research, I think that's accurate what I just said. I'm pretty sure that's accurate.

42:52I don't know of any other way that you would. I guess you might have a hard time remembering something, You know, like you have tip of the tongue or something like that if the if you get if you're getting old like me Or you haven't used the memory in a while Then some of the There could be you know, but there's no sort of real pruning going on or like atrophy to this sort of stuff Well, there is pruning But I don't think I I mean pruning it happen if you don't use it, you lose it. I mean, for sure pruning happens very intensely in children's brains. It happens also in adult brains, but slower.

43:39Everything happens slower. All the tuning and pruning happens much more slowly in adult brains, but much slower the older you get. But I don't think that there's pruning for really intense memories or memories that have, we would call them stressful maybe or threatening or what have you, but I would say, you know, that have a strong metabolic demand that they require, you know, that they are,

44:13They have a strong impact on your metabolic state. Those memories typically are not pruned as far as I know. What can be done though is certain chemicals you can take, certain drugs that will prevent you from consolidating the memory in the first place. And I think there is research going on that attempts to prevent certain memories from really taking hold physically, and the experience is taking hold physically in the brain. Is this like the equivalent of taking Narcan for an overdose on a traumatic experience? A little bit, a little bit. Yeah, a little bit. bad happen to you. Let's hit you with this whatever like anti -colonurgic or some something.

45:05Right. I mean, the thing is it's a very complex process, right? That involves like hundreds of chemicals. And so if you knock out a couple of the chemicals, you know, the likelihood is that you'll have a harder time consolidating the memory. And therefore you won't be able to remember. It's so fascinating. That's so fascinating. I don't. But yeah, sorry, go ahead. Just so you could have an acute intervention for something that happens. I've heard that women post childbirth, I've given a flood of hormone or a flood of neurochemicals that give them a sort of retrospective pain amnesia about the discomfort that they went through.

45:47That is such, that is like a myth. My friend Daniel Slasputt and his stand -up special, I'm going to have to tell him. That is a myth. I could listen. I Can find different myth or personal myth Well, I'm telling you that I can remember how painful it was and my husband can confirm that I can remember how painful it was but but what I would say is

46:17What's interesting about pain, right? is that But if I said to you, Chris, I want you to keep your eyes open. And in your mind's eye, I want you to imagine a red macintosh apple of the sort that you would eat. Can you see the ghost of a red apple in your mind's eye? Kind of. Yeah, right? And if I asked you to, you know, if I asked you, what's your favorite band, like your favorite musical band? Sleep token. Oh gosh, I don't even know them. Yeah, well, that's how old I am. Okay. Well, can you can you hear one of their songs in your head? Mm -hmm. Right? Pretty vividly probably, right? Yep. Yeah, okay.

47:04But if I said, what's the most painful thing that ever happened to you? Mm -hmm. Pick a painful thing that's happened to you. Now, try to actually embody that pain. Like, imagine it. Can you?

47:22Kind of not really though. And with difficulty, yeah. You have an awareness that you were in pain. Yes. But you aren't feeling the pain the way that you're hearing the song. That's correct. That's correct. Yeah. So that's a really interesting thing about what we would call interoceptive signaling, signaling from the sensory conditions of the body. We can't exactly simulate it. The predictions that our brains are making don't reinstate the experience in the same way that it will with vision or with hearing or sometimes with taste. Which is interesting. and I, you know, don't know that anyone knows why that's the case, but it does seem to be the case.

48:18So, I mean, a lot of really funky things do happen in pregnancy and in childbirth, hormonally speaking. I mean, when I was pregnant with my daughter right before I delivered her, my husband could open a box of Cheerios in the kitchen and I could be four rooms away and I could smell it. I could, I mean, I could tell the difference between Cheerios and Rice Krispies or whatever. You know, like, my sense of smell was really quite alarmingly and interestingly intense. But I don't know about, I think the most women I know completely remember how painful childbirth was. I'll have to inform my friend who pushed fake news to theaters of people around the United States.

49:14Well, it's probably a funny, it's probably a funny, it's a very funny joke. It might just be a useful, a useful dramatic tool. I want to talk about, I want to talk about anxiety, sort of emotion, de jour of the modern world. It seems, what do you wish more people knew about anxiety and how it works? Well, I don't think there's one cause of anxiety exactly, but I do think that your brain is making sense of signals, and there are other ways to make sense of those signals. So, anxiety usually is, you know, it's usually occurring in situations where there's a lot of uncertainty, and there's a lot of arousal, meaning there's a lot of chemicals.

49:59There's a more a higher concentration of chemicals that are involved in your brain attempting to learn that is taken new. It takes in signals because it's not predicting particularly well. There's a lot of us, what it means when there's a lot of uncertainty. Your brain can't prepare one motor plan. It's preparing many and it doesn't know which one is the one, the right one to choose. It's such a great definition. That's such a lovely way to think about it, especially what we've said previously about the importance of prediction for future events. Yeah. So the go to meaning doesn't have to be anxiety.

50:35If you experience heightened arousal as uncertainty, you do different things than if you experience it as anxiety. And you're not just labeling. It's not labeling. It's you're embodying a different meaning. And And what do you do when you're uncertain about something? You forage for information. To take care of you so you could be interesting. Yeah, yeah. What do you do when you're anxious? You usually withdraw.

51:12And sometimes there's probably utility in experiencing a high arousal unpleasant state as uncertainty. There is research, not my research, but research by a guy named Jeremy Jamison who trained people to recategorize or make meaning of their high arousal states as determination. And he was able to, in these studies, train people to overcome their test anxiety by dissolving it. Basically, their high arousal states remained high, but they experienced it differently because they made a different meaning of it. And there's great utility to getting rid of test anxiety. It can be the difference between, mean the difference between hundreds of thousands of dollars over your lifetime in earning capacity.

52:13My personal, example that I love that I've used in my book and I talk about sometimes because I love this example. It's an example of my daughter when she was 12. When my daughter was 12, she was barely five feet tall and she was testing for her black belt in karate. Her sensei was a tenth degree black belt. So this guy could break a board by looking at it, right? He was just like really massively strong guy and she had to spar these like 15 16 17 year old boys who were like a foot taller than her in order to over two days to achieve this black belt and her her sense a you know kind of saunters up to her and he just says Get your butterflies flying in formation And I was like, oh my God, that is amazing.

53:12He didn't say calm down little girl because actually calming down would be the wrong thing to do. When you are in a motivated performance situation, you don't want to become, you want that arousal. But if you experience it as anxiety, the motor plans that come with that are very different. then if you experience it as determination or as getting your butterflies in formation. And I personally have used that particular concept multiple times in my life when I've been faced in a mode of it like before I gave my TED Talk. You know, before I give my TED Talk in front of a thousand people, I could feel my heartbeats in my fingertips.

54:01Like that's how much arousal was in my body. I was like, if somebody brought a flame near me, I probably would have combusted. Like I was just wired. But you know, I just and I had to say to myself, like out loud, you know, this is not anxiety. Get your butterflies flying information. Because under those circumstances, what comes to you is the really is the thing that has been ingrained in you. The most automatic thing. in our culture, the most automatic thing is to make sense of those experiences as a route, as anxiety. But you do have choices, you know? You do have choices. I'm thinking about that uncertainty and ambiguity point.

54:49I'm wondering what it is about the modern world, which is providing us with such potent fuel for anxiety to come through. You mean such potent fuel for uncertain? Yeah, so I would say, what is, I would say there's a lot of uncertainty and... Well, there's a lot of anxiety where is the uncertainty ambiguity, how is that being born through if that's one of the key drivers of that emotion? Yeah, so what I would say is there's a lot of uncertainty And there's a lot of metabolic, there's a lot of, well, I mean, we haven't talked about, you know, your brain's most important job is regulating your body and all of that.

55:37But, you know, people are walking around basically metabolically and covered all the time. And partly that's the case because there's so much uncertainty. Uncertainty is very expensive for a nervous system to manage. And as a consequence, there's a lot of arousal and people are, the go -to kind of knee -jerk a way of making sense of that and experiencing it as anxiety. So I think that we've engineered for ourselves like the perfect environment basically to bankrupt a human nervous system. And I think that I wrote about this in my book and I continue to think that this is the case, you know, that if you think about all of the moments where in all of the things that could be potentially demanding, you know, making it hard for you to predict well, you could just start to enumerate them, you know.

56:44I mean, most people don't get a sufficient amount of sleep. We actually, now, you know, there's a lot of discussion now about getting enough sleep, but still we have modern life is not designed really for sleeping well. We have computers, we have phones, we have a lot of screens, those screens have, you know, light in them that stimulates our, gangly and cells in our retina that screws up our circadian rhythm. That's not trivial actually. That's a really substantially important thing.

57:24We eat pseudo food that isn't really, you know, isn't necessarily really healthy and can really screw up your predictions. If you're eating something with or drinking soda or eating things with artificial sweeteners, the taste no longer is a good predictor of the glucose concentration, you know, we have social media where I mean human, the biggest one of the biggest sources of uncertainty for humans is other humans. You know the best thing for your nervous system is another human. The worst thing for your nervous system is also another human. And we, you know, are ways of interacting with each other now, you know, are also someone uncertain, like somebody walks up to you and goes, hey bitch, like, well is that high, nice to see you, or is that, you know, like somebody calling you a not nice name, like, but, you know, and then there's also economic uncertainty, there's climate change, and you wouldn't think climate change, you know, you wouldn't think that that really necessarily, I mean, it doesn't matter whether you believe in climate change or not.

58:41The thing is that climate change, climate change is happening and you cannot believe it, but the impact of the change will still impact your nervous system, whether you believe it or not. Climate change means that one of the consequences is that there are small changes in carbon dioxide concentrations in the air and very, very small changes in carbon dioxide concentrations actually have a profound impact on vertebrate nervous systems. Usually, I think it may also impact a non -vertebrate nervous system too. Okay. So you're saying that the parts per million increase is maybe as much of a concern for our emotional system as our climate system?

59:19Well, you don't have an emotional system, but I would say it's as much of a... No, well, you know... Yeah, yeah. Listen, a mental system, should we say? No. For your brain. For your brain's ability to control your body. And, you know, you may think of that as that distinction as kind of like splitting hairs, but you invited me on camera. Keep me in mind. Hey, you're the specialist and you're here for a reason and keeping me in line is one of them. This is very important for today. But yes, it turns out that very small changes in carbon dioxide actually actually has an impact on a measurable impact on nervous systems.

59:57And so, you know, I mean, and then in the United States, there are also other issues, you know, like there are school shootings, there are, you know, which happen at alarming frequencies, right? And then you also have like political uncertainty and doesn't really matter whether you're on the left or on the right, you know, whether you're a liberal or conservative, there's a lot of uncertainty for everybody. So this, your nervous system doesn't, your brain doesn't really like parse these things and go, well, this is one kind of uncertainty and that's another kind. And no, it just, it just, they compound each other.

1:00:43They just make it harder for your brain to do its job. And the result is increases in chemicals that will, you will experience as a rousal and you will make sense of, as anxiety, all other things being equal. It's kind of inescapable. It seems like a pretty sort of perfect cocktail to create an environment that this would be a common experience for a lot of people. Well, I think it is a common experience for a lot of people, but they make sense of it as, you know, like, oh, my fight in flight circuits are like overworked or whatever, but you don't have fight -or -flight circuits. There are no fight -or -flight circuits in your brain.

1:01:22And I think people do things to try to reduce their discomfort, some of which are... This is just my speculation now, but there's no evidence that this is the case. But basically, We know, here's what we do know, we know that from mathematical modeling, using intelligent agents, it seems to be the case that if the evidence suggests that if I make myself predictable to you, you will be more predictable to me and that's a benefit to both of our nervous systems. We'll like each other more and if we like each other more, we'll be influenced by each other more. So if you wanted to reduce uncertainty in your, like, or not even if you wanted to, you don't even have to know this, right?

1:02:23Like, if you just, if you feel better when you're around people who are like, who are similar to you, who you can predict better, you're going to be around them more because it feels better. The suggestion here is as well that if you want them to regulate you more, behaving in a consistent and predictable manner yourself is going to influence them, which will influence you, which will... Right, exactly, exactly. And I think that this might be one of the reasons why people are in their own little echo chambers right now, where they're out of all of the information that people and experiences people can expose themselves to what we see is this, you know, self -selection into information bubbles and social bubbles that are where viewpoints are being the diversity of viewpoints is decreasing.

1:03:32Unchallenged. Unchallenged. And I think it my speculation, right, is that it might be because people are really encumbered. They're really encumbered. I mean, we haven't even talked about the fact that, you know, like I said, okay, well, you know, you're eating pseudo food and you know, you might wonder, well, what is that? Why does that matter? Well, it matters because what you eat, how much you sleep, these things actually matter to your brain's ability to properly metabolically regulate your body in an efficient way. And if you know, if that, if the inability to do so happens in a given moment, nothing bad's going to happen to you, but you'll pay maybe a little tax, right?

1:04:21Like evidence suggests, for example, that if you're engaged, if you're exposed to social stress, that means a stressful situation involving another person within two hours of eating, your metabolism becomes less efficient to the tune of 104 calories. So it's like you ate 104 more calories than you actually ate. If you add that up over a year of meals, that's 11 pounds. It's almost exactly a pound a month. Yeah. Yeah. So that means that you could eat the exact same thing. You can even be eating like super healthy. But if you're exposed within two hours, the research suggests that's, you know, 11 pounds in a year.

1:05:07So the point is that these like little metabolic efficiencies that inefficiencies that happen from these little moments of uncertainty or little moments of stress, they add up over time and they leave you vulnerable to metabolic illnesses. Well, what are metabolic illnesses? Metabolic illnesses are, well, we know diabetes, heart disease, depression, anxiety. These are illnesses that have a very strong metabolic basis. And so my point is that there isn't one cause of anxiety. There are all these little nudges, enough little nudges in the same direction produce a big shove.

1:05:56It seems to me, it's an interesting point to bring up how other people can impact us. There's a lot of conversation at the moment about the impact of loneliness, too much, it's not even necessarily solitude, it's people feeling like they don't have anyone around them. The most common answer to the question, how many friends can you call on an emergency? Zero, it's not the mean, but it is the most... It said blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm interested in what the impact is of toxic relationships on our health. That, as you said there, the best thing for our nervous system is the human, but the worst thing for our nervous system is that too.

1:06:31What is the impact of toxic relationships on our health? Well, I think, you know, the evidence, I think, on loneliness and feeling alone and so on. I think the evidence is clearer there, just probably because more research has been done on that topic. But I mean, all things being equal, you will lose years off your life if you are really alone. Not if you're by yourself and you're fine being by yourself, but if you're lonely, if you really, if you don't have a connected social, you know, if you don't even have one person than that you can call on, that you feel that you could rely on. I think it's important to understand that we are social animals.

1:07:21And what that means is we are the caretakers of each other's nervous systems, whether we like it or not. It doesn't matter again what your politics are. It's irrelevant what you believe. The fact is that we aren't built. We didn't evolve as creatures to regulate our own nervous systems by ourselves. We need help. We need other people to help to bear that burden. The problem, I think, is that, as I said before, that other people are also the largest source of uncertainty in our lives.

1:07:59And, you know, I think there's pretty good evidence to suggest that, Well, there's definitely evidence to suggest that if you're in a relationship that is physically harmful to you or sexually harmful to you, where adverse adverse events are happening, that will take a toll on not just your emotional health but your physical health. And if you're a child or an adolescent and this is happening, it will actually, there's It's almost a parametric relationship between your experience of those events and the likelihood that you will develop metabolic illness of some sort in adulthood or middle age.

1:08:47So it's really pernicious. That being said, there is also evidence that, but I don't think this is not really evidence about a toxic relationship. So there's evidence that if adverse circumstances happen to you like a one shot, a big one shot thing Your way of making meaning of that can have a really big effect on it's in how it impacts your biology It's very different to a chronic stress situation though. Yes, it is and I think I Think we would probably think of a toxic relationship more like a chronic stress situation. I mean stress is just the definition of stress really in our lab, the way we think about it is, stress is your brain predicting the need for a big metabolic outlay.

1:09:43And that could be for any number of reasons. But if it happens chronically and you're mispredicting at all, then what What happens is the mechanisms, the healthy mechanisms that occur that are engaged to prepare for that metabolic outlet become dysregulated and then you're basically you have this pervasive metabolic dysregulation that occurs. That's the problem with chronic stress. The problem is that you're basically drained your gas tank and it's kind of damaged the mechanisms in the process kind of thing. But I think probably there's research on the effects of longer term adverse relationships.

1:10:48I'm just not... I don't know that literature super well. What are the mechanisms that are turned on in chronic stress? You mentioned certain things get damaged. certain things are sort of always on, you can't switch them off, gas tank is empty. What does chronic stress look like metabolically? What does it do to the brain? Well, what happens in, so if we think about stress as just any time your brain is predicting a big metabolic outlay. So when you drag your ass out of bed in the morning, your brain, before, as you're waking up, your brain is signaling the need for cortisol because cortisol is not a solution stress hormone, it's a hormone that gets glucose and it basically makes your, it allows your cells to metabolize glucose more easily, basically.

1:11:43And so standing up is metabolically costly. Like the most expensive thing that your brain can do is move your body, learn something new, deal with persistent uncertainty, and deal with an immune system that is chronic monically active, meaning that you have some metabolic, some immune dysfunction, like an, you know, which would lead to, like, like say an autoimmune illness or something. So like elevated. Persisting infection. Right. Yeah, exactly. So when you wake up, if you go to exercise, you have a cortisol surge because your brain is predicting a big metabolic outlay. But what happens often, like let's say, when you're sitting in a boardroom at a business meeting or you're, you know, you have to talk to your friend of me or you're worried about, you know, getting into a fight with your girlfriend or whatever it is, your brain is preparing for big metabolic outlay.

1:12:48And then you don't need that, you don't need that so you're flushed with glucose and you don't need the glucose, you don't need the extra glucose. That's like a false alarm. If that happens frequently enough, your cells become insensitive to cortisol, which means that they can't utilize that signal anymore when you actually need it. So cortisol dysregulation is an example of what happens in chronic stress. But that sounds good. Oh, I'm not so sensitive to cortisol anymore. I can handle the cortisol more effectively What it means is that your cells won't When cortisol is in the blood The cells can't utilize it anymore.

1:13:41They're they ignore it because it's a signal that doesn't have any meaning anymore It's always there. So when you go to drag your ass at a bed in the morning There's a cortisol increase, but your cells can't utilize it. And so how do you feel? You feel exhausted like you can't move, right? Or you know, when you you have to prepare for a big meeting and you need that cortisol to you need yourselves to be able to utilize that cortisol. Well, now it can't. So how do you feel? Well, you feel fuzzy headed. Cortisol is one chemical of thousands of chemicals that work like this, right? So, what happens is there is a dysregulation of the normal mechanisms for regulating the body and eventually this results in vulnerability to illness, not the first time, not the tenth time, but eventually.

1:14:45And what's interesting about this is that, you know, research shows that a single interaction and that is unple - socially unpleasant, like where somebody yells at you, or especially if you're a kid or an adolescent, but even in adulthood, where somebody's rude to you or whatever, you see an effect. Now that effect isn't gonna persist necessarily because it's just once, right? These are like little effects that take a long time to add up until they become a problem, but eventually they will become a problem. How does chronic stress impact memory, our ability to encode things, recall them? Well, it's a complicated relationship.

1:15:35The evidence suggests that there's an optimum level, if something doesn't matter to you at all, like it has no, your brain is predicting it will have no metabolic impact. you won't even pay attention to it. Like you won't remember it. It's like noise. It's just like you won't remember it. If your stress level is too high, meaning that there's too much demand on the system, you also probably won't remember well. There's an optimum level of stress, actually. It's like an inverted U. That's what the research suggests. How would you advise someone to rebuild their function after a period of prolonged stress?

1:16:25Someone's had a rough period, they've been sort of getting through it and they think, wow, that sort of tied but wide thing, that really sounds like me or I wake up on a morning and I feel sluggish. That does actually correlate with a period where I was kind of eating it a little bit emotionally and that thing had to deal with mom and had to deal with work and had to deal with the like what is a good way for that person to bring themselves back into a state of normality? Well, I would say a state of optimal metabolism or optimal energy efficiency. I would say, first of all, your mood is a pretty good clue to a very simple summary or like a very simple barometer of your metabolic state.

1:17:15So if you're feeling okay, you have enough energy, you perceive enough energy, you feel pretty good. Probably everything is going pretty well. Metabolically speaking. And if you're feeling really distressed or really dragged out, probably there's some metabolic demand. And I would say, I mean, it's so boring, Chris, what I have to say about this is like, like, here she goes, she's gonna be a mother. Eat, healthily, get enough sleep. Whatever that means for you. Like eight hours isn't for everybody. You just have to get enough sleep that you eventually will wake up feeling rested. And even just resting, like, I learned this, I couldn't believe it's actually.

1:18:00I, you know, used to do yoga quite a bit. I had back surgery a couple of years ago and so it's curbed my ability to do yoga a little bit but I used to do yoga every like a lot like three times a week and But Shavasana was always like the hardest thing for me like where you're laying flat, you know, and some Yoga to chill out Yoga to circus. I was like, oh, this is my favorite part And I'll be like this is a living hell for me to lie here like for six minutes whatever It turns out there's actually evidence that it's really good for you to just Lie down and have a rest for a minute Oh, interesting question on that.

1:18:36What does it mean then that there's good evidence lying down having a rest for a minute is good for you, but your experience of it was one of stress? Well, it wasn't good for me. I mean, you have to actually tune out the, you know, rum, well, I've got to, you know, like tune out the, you know, your inner troll, like, oh, I've got to do this. I've got to do that. And I've got it. The minute I, as soon as I'm allowed to get out of here, I've got it, you know, no, you have to actually rest. rest means your mind isn't racing at 100 miles an hour. So, but I mean, rest is good. Eating healthily, exercising, even if it means just going for a walk, even if it's just a walk around the block, it's a start.

1:19:17So these things actually are like 50 % of the, I don't know if it's 50, but it's like a lot of the equation here. And I would say, you know, be a little gentler with yourself If you're recovering from an illness or you've lived in a really, you're just coming out of a really stressful period, you have to remember that you're just not as resilient and you are not, you're not as resilient as you will be once you're, so you just have to really, I think, take care to get enough rest and really do your best to not make more out of it than that, right? If you have the flu, what do you do? You lie down, you watch TV, you drink chicken soup, you take, you know, maybe, you know, Tylenol or whatever, you don't berate yourself for being a horrible person.

1:20:16You have the flu. The symptoms of prolonged stress are very similar to the flu. Maybe no nausea, but definitely, you know, the fatigue and the, you know, And so you just have to be a little more patient and gentle with yourself as you recover. You've said today our brains are pretty flexible. We have more of a control over our emotional state than we might think that we are able to step in. What's the limit? What can't we rewire ourselves to do what's the upper bound of our ability to step into our our own brains? Well I think it's different for different people. It depends on a lot of different factors but I mean you can't snap your fingers and change your mood for example.

1:21:13If you feel like shit you can change the flavor of the shit that you're experiencing, but you can't actually turn it off the way you would flip off a light switch. It just doesn't work like that. You have to tolerate it. You might tell yourself, this is noise. You might experience it as not relevant, kind of like chatter in a way. I mean, normally when we feel unpleasant about something, the first thing we do is look to the world, like what's wrong with the world? You know, this is a clue, or we might look to ourselves, and what's wrong with me? But it could just be that you're metabolically kind of like depleted.

1:21:57And so I think how you make sense of things matters to a point. But you can't, if you're feeling distress or fatigue, you can't just, you know, do a couple of Jedi mind tricks and talk yourself out of it. It doesn't work like that. And if you're really ruminating, meaning that you have intrusive thoughts or thoughts that are, you're going over and over and over and you know, that are just turning around, turning around in your mind, it's very hard to turn those off. I mean, you need to try, it's really not healthy for you, but you're just, you're just giving those thoughts essentially, you're, you're sort of juicing them up to be more easily reinstated later.

1:22:37But it's very hard to do that. And sometimes you have to literally change your context in order. You have to think of them like mental habits in a sense. And the way to change a habit is not willpower. The way to change a habit is to change your context. Because a habit is nothing more than automatic behavior that is governed by predictions which are influenced, shaped by the context that you're in. If you change your context, you make it easier to shift into a different set of predictions. What would context consist of in the rumination example? What would that look like? It depends on... I mean, I can't give you a specific recipe because the conditions of human life are so varied.

1:23:27but it could literally mean go out for a walk, immerse yourself in something, get outside your head. For me, honestly, one thing that helps me a lot, it's not gonna help everybody, but it helps me. I do neuroanatomy. I'll crack open a neuroanatomy book, and there are a couple of anatomical problems I've been working on for a while, and I'll just read some in our anatomy. It absorbs it. It's like the niche solution. Yeah. Yeah. But I also could do something like I might watch television or watch a movie. Well, I don't really watch television, but like I might watch a movie or a serial or something and knit.

1:24:12Right? Or I might go for a walk and I might bird watch or I might work in the garden. Seems like you're trying to engage yourself. You're trying to engage your brain in a different set of automatic predictions. Will power, like the kind of will power that you might use, that we understand, we understand this, you know, like I really want to eat that second piece of chocolate cake and I have to tell myself not to eat it. That's what we think of as control. That kind of control rarely works and it's it's it's infrequent compared to the other sources of control that are automatically going on inside your brain and you just have to figure out how to harness those.

1:25:04So find something that you you find immersive and that isn't about you. And that's a good recipe for trying to control these things that are really, really kind of hard to control actually. Hmm. The thing that's, I guess, interesting, reassuring and a little bit daunting that I've taken away from this, is the amount of responsibility that we all can take over sort of what's happening to us. Although it's very disempowering to think, well, you know, these emotions are just happening and I'm along for the ride. It's not that, doesn't feel particularly great. But in some ways, it kind of relinquishes you of any of the responsibility of having to step in and there's nothing I can do.

1:25:53There's nothing I can do about my anxiety. There's nothing that I can do about my chronic stress. There's nothing I can do about my rumination. Well, welcome to the quandary of modern life. I mean, I think the idea that you're not responsible for your emotions and or better said that you're not responsible for your behavior when you're under the influence of an emotion, that you've just described a large part of Western legal theory. You know, I mean, so, but I think that you put your, you put your finger on exactly the quandary. You know, the very thing that gives a lot of people hope is the thing that, is the thing that means, what it means is that you, you know, you have more responsibility for, for you act and how you feel, then you might think you do.

1:26:56And I think the important thing, and I'm really, you know, this is an important thing to say, sometimes we're responsible for things not because we're to blame for them, but because we're the only ones who can change them. So you just have to figure out what you want in your life and how hard you're willing to work for it. And everybody always needs, everyone needs a little help sometimes. That help can be another person, that help could be a medication, that help could be, it could come in many different forms. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to do everything yourself, but you are the architect of your life.

1:27:36Not everybody has the same options. It's a lot harder, as I said before, to sort of take the reins, you know, then we would like it's harder, it takes more time, it's not always as effective as we would like, but everybody can have more control over their experience and their actions than they think they can. And that means everybody has a little more responsibility than they might realize. And that's pressure. There is a degree of pressure, but there's also kind of liberation that comes along with it. So it's an interesting blend. Dr. Lisa Feldman -Barratt, ladies and gentlemen, you're fantastic Lisa.

1:28:14I think you're wonderful. I really enjoy your work. Where should people go? They're going to want to check out everything you've got going on. LisaFeldLembert .com Easy as that. Two books that everybody should read including one that's like the perfect holiday. I don't want to just do true crime, romance, fiction stuff and is an easy reading than something else which is deeper to. At least I appreciate you very much. Thank you so much. Congratulations, you made it to the end of the episode and if you want more, well, why don't you press right here?