Stay Resolved

0:00This message comes from NPR sponsor Rosetta Stone, an expert in language learning for 30 years. Right now, NPR listeners can get Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership to 25 different languages for 50 % off. Learn more at rosettastone.com slash NPR. Hey there, it's Manoush. We are putting the finishing touches on a brand new episode to help you kick off 2024. We're going to help you rethink some of the biggest topics that might be keeping you up at night this year. That's coming next week. But meanwhile, we thought we'd share our New Year's show from last year because we love this one. It's about the things that people resolve to do most.

0:44In fact, you have probably made one of these things your New Year's resolution. Last year, this year, you'll probably do it again next year. So every year. This one's a keeper. So enjoy. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you.

1:23I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And today on the show, Resolved. So, you know, I arrived at New York University on January 15th, 1998, as a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young assistant professor. This is Wendy Suzuki. She's now a full, tenured professor of neuroscience and psychology at NYU. But in 1998, she was just a newbie, hoping to make a name for herself. I wanted to make a splash and I wanted to discover something new about the hippocampus and how memory worked. And that was such an exciting time.

2:14Because Wendy started her own lab with grad and Ph.D. students, all helping her do cutting-edge research. And I just focused so hard because as a research scientist, I had six years to prove myself to get tenure. And if I got tenure, then I would have a job for life. But there's a really, really high bar. So Wendy went to work. I was going to just work, work, work, work, work and do nothing else. After six years, Wendy was on the cusp of getting what she wanted, tenure. She was well established and respected in her field. but all that work work work work work work it took a toll I had no friends and I was eating so much takeout and I didn't move my body at all and um I just felt really really bad you were burned out I think I was lonely I was unbalanced I'd gained 25 pounds but it was really this feeling of how come I'm not happier despite the fact that part of me said, you have no right to be dissatisfied.

3:22You have this, you know, tenure track position. You can get to do all this cool stuff. But nonetheless, I was unhappy and I did not know quite what to do. And I said, okay, I'm going to give myself a vacation. I need a break. So she took one and went to the Cotahuasi River in Peru for an adventurous rafting trip. And I went and being outside and getting more physical was just such, it felt so good. But at the same time, I'm looking around and every single person on this trip was stronger than I was. There were 16 year olds that had more upper body strength than I did and 65 year olds. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm so weak.

4:08I need to do something. I never want to feel like the weakest person again. What did you do? Literally, the next day after I got back from Peru, I remember I had all these bug bites on my legs because of all the insects. But I marched down to the closest gym to my work, and I signed up. And it was that, like, I can't feel. This is something's wrong. I'm feeling too weak. And I need to feel stronger. And that was my resolution. Wendy resolved to be stronger, healthier, to improve herself, as so many of us vow to do, especially this time of year. As we know, however, resolutions, they are easy to make and even easier to break.

4:59But what if you got a different perspective on why you should keep going with a new healthy habit? What if an idea or story could motivate you in a whole new way? Today on the show, Resolved, the most common resolutions people make and new reasons to stick with them. From saving more money to eating better, seeing the world, and spending more time with family. And let's go back to Wendy Suzuki. She had been working out at the gym for a little over a year when she had a revelation. I was writing a grant in my office, and this is something that neuroscientists and researchers have to do a lot. And it's usually just this horrible, you know, pulling out your hair process.

5:48You never know whether it's good enough. You're competing against Nobel laureates. But I said to myself one day, wow, writing went well that day. And I had never, ever had that thought go through my mind. And I realized that I was not only feeling better and more energetic, but my memory seemed to be working better. My hippocampus that I was studying in my own lab seemed to be working better. And my focus was working better. And that is what really made me sit up and take notice and say, what's going on here? And how can I get more? What's going on with my brain? I really like this feeling. Exactly.

6:29It was truly a turning point in my career and in my life. So as a curious neuroscientist, I went to the literature to see what I could find about what we knew about the effects of exercise on the brain. And what I found was an exciting and a growing literature that was essentially showing everything that I noticed in myself. Wendy Suzuki continues her story from the TED stage. Better mood, better energy, better memory, better attention. And so now, after several years of really focusing on this question, I've come to the following conclusion, that exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain today for the following three reasons.

7:14Number one, it has immediate effects on your brain. A single workout that you do will immediately increase levels of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and noradrenaline. That is going to increase your mood right after that workout. Exactly what I was feeling. My lab showed that a single workout can improve your ability to shift and focus attention, and that focus improvement will last for at least two hours. And studies have shown that a single workout will improve your reaction times, which basically means that you are going to be faster at catching that cup of Starbucks that falls off the counter, which is very, very important.

7:56But these immediate effects are transient. They help you right after. What you have to do is do what I did, that is change your exercise regime, increase your cardiorespiratory function to get the long-lasting effects. And these effects are long-lasting because exercise actually changes the brain's anatomy, physiology, and function. Let's start with my favorite brain area, the hippocampus. Exercise actually produces brand new brain cells, new brain cells in the hippocampus that actually increase its volume as well as improve your long term memory. You say in your TED talk that we now know that exercise promotes brain cell growth, But do we know how?

8:46Yeah. So what's happening is that there are signals that come from the muscles themselves. There are proteins released by the muscles when they are working, when you're out on your power walk or doing your kickbox class. The muscles release proteins. The liver releases ketones. And the fat tissue also releases substances. all of these signals are going up through the blood-brain barrier into the brain. And one of the biggest things that they do is they release what are called growth factors in your brain. These growth factors we know are the key to growing new hippocampal brain cells. There are lots of other neurotransmitters and neurochemicals that get signaled that give you, what I like to call a bubble bath of neurochemicals every single time you move your body.

9:46That is what you're doing. You're changing the neurochemical milieu of your brain in a positive way. Number two, the most common finding in neuroscience studies looking at the effects of exercise, long-term exercise, is improved attention function dependent on your prefrontal cortex. You not only get better focus and attention, but the volume of the hippocampus increases as well. You not only get immediate effects of mood with exercise, but those last for a long time, so you get long-lasting increases in those good mood neurotransmitters. But really, the most transformative thing that exercise will do is its protective effects on your brain.

10:30Here you can think about the brain like a muscle. The more you're working out, the bigger and stronger your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex gets. Why is that important? Because the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus are the two areas that are most susceptible to neurodegenerative diseases and normal cognitive decline in aging. So with increased exercise over your lifetime, you're not going to cure dementia or Alzheimer's disease, but what you're going to do is you're going to create the strongest, biggest hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. So it takes longer for these diseases to actually have an effect.

11:09You can think of exercise, therefore, as a supercharged 401k for your brain. Okay? And it's even better because it's free. So there are long-term, wonderful effects of exercising on the brain. We've talked to other researchers about that on the show. But you've also done research into how exercise can make me feel better right now. And so, I mean, I'm going to ask the question everybody wants to ask, right? What is the minimum I need to do in order to feel better right now? 10 minutes of walking, walking with a W, has been shown to have significant improvements on mood states, significantly decreasing anxiety and depression levels, and also increasing positive mood states.

12:04But what if you are not exercising regularly? How much exercise do you need to start to see clear brain benefits? And the answer is two to three times a week of 45-minute exercise. And after three months, our exercise group had significantly higher baseline mood rates. In other words, they were happier at their baseline. Number two, they had better performance on a task of focused attention, a very classic one that some of your listeners might have heard of, the Stroop task. And they also did better on recognition memory, which is dependent on the hippocampus and the surrounding structures there.

12:51Do you think that that could be maybe the one thing that could keep people going? Like if they know that exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain, maybe that's the nudge that they need. It could help. Absolutely. People have a vague notion that exercise might be good generally. But yeah, if they really knew all the things that exercise was doing for their brain, imagine a watering can with growth factors that you are watering your hippocampus with growth factors. You're making it that much more fluffy, that much more big and fat every single time you move your body.

13:39Wendy Suzuki is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at New York University. She's also the author of the book Healthy Brain, Happy Life. You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, Resolved. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

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16:23It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, Resolved. We are rethinking New Year's resolutions. What works, what doesn't, and what just makes things worse, like dieting. So the reason that dieting is so hard is that the brain reacts exactly the same way to someone who deliberately loses weight as it does to someone who is starving. This is Sandra Amitt. She's a neuroscientist who's written a lot about why dieting tends to fail. Basically, our brains, they prefer to keep us alive. Yeah, your brain literally thinks you are experiencing a famine and responds accordingly.

17:12So that you are actually going to burn fewer calories as you move around because your brain is trying to keep you from starving to death. I got interested in this topic in the first place because of my own history. I started dieting when I was 13 and of normal weight, which happens to a lot of girls especially. My mom said something about how I was eating like a fat person and it freaked me out. So I went on my first diet and gained the weight back as almost everyone does. And I lost and gained the same 15 pounds about twice a year every year from then until I was 40. And what happened when you turned 40?

18:04So I found out about some of the scientific research that indicated that my brain was actually doing what it was supposed to do in causing me to gain that weight back. And so in 2010, as my New Year's resolution, I decided to quit dieting, stop weighing myself, and I was going to do my absolute best to stay weight neutral, to let my body settle at the weight it wanted to be. Was that scary to make that New Year's resolution for you? Oh, it was. I had no idea what was going to happen. And like anybody who's put that much energy into trying to control their weight, I had this fantasy nightmare that I was going to end up weighing 300 pounds and eating nothing but cookies for the rest of my life.

19:02So what did happen during that year? So in terms of my weight, it was shockingly uneventful. I basically stayed where I was. And in terms of my mental health, it was revelatory. I mean, partly I was mad, right? Because I had wasted an untold amount of willpower over the course of the previous 30-something years trying to control something that turned out I was better off not trying to control. But also the amount of space that that freed up, the amount of attention that I had for things that were more important to me than what I looked like. It was just amazing. So we shouldn't give people the impression that after you stop dieting, you just stop thinking about your body or about your health.

19:57part of your investigation into what could work led you to start researching something called mindful eating. What is mindful eating, basically? So the purpose of mindful eating, from my perspective, is to put your body's weight regulation system back in control of your eating, which is to say to eat when you're hungry and stop eating when you're full. and that is the way people were eating for hundreds of thousands of years before anybody invented diet apps and calorie counting but a lot of us have lost track of how to do that so we have to deliberately pay attention to our body's signals in order to move back in that direction.

20:49And that's basically what mindful eating means, is to pay attention to how your body is feeling without judging it. No judgment. Yeah. So as soon as you start thinking, oh, I shouldn't be hungry. Oh, I'm such a pig. Look what I ate. Any of that kind of stuff, you are no longer practicing mindfulness. To be mindful, you have to be aware of what's going on. both physically and emotionally with yourself, but not immediately jump to close off your curiosity about that with judgment. Zandra says there are three steps to approaching a meal mindfully. The first, mini meditations. Where you just stop what you're doing, take a deep breath, focus on your body, and think through, what am I feeling and what do I want right now?

21:47Am I hungry? Am I not hungry? Do I feel like something sweet, something crunchy, something salty? It's very quick. You can do it in the buffet line. Why am I reaching for another helping of lasagna? Am I actually really hungry? Or am I bored, stressed? That's when you can take it further with a body scan. Which is a longer practice where you sit there and go through your body piece by piece and say, okay, what is my right big toe feeling right on through to the tip of your head? And as people get better at that, they tend also to get better at knowing when they're hungry and when they're full.

22:28Now, Sandra says learning to listen to your body, it takes practice. One of the things that dieting does to us is it deliberately causes us to stop listening to hunger signals, right? If you're dieting, the whole point is that you eat when the diet says you eat, not when you're hungry. And a lot of us cope with that by trying to just forget that we're hungry. And so it does frequently take six months to a year after you start seriously concentrating on it to get back in touch and figure out what your body is trying to tell you. The third step, she says, is movement. some kind of movement that you enjoy, that you want in your life, not because it's good for you, but because you really love it.

23:17That it helps to reorient your idea of yourself from, I am a person who looks like this, to I am a person who is strong, I am a person who is skilled, I am a person who can do these things with my body, which turns out to be a much better way in terms of mental health to think about your body than thinking about it in terms of the way it looks. Okay. So let's say someone has decided they are going to eat more healthfully this year. You would say the thing that's going to keep you sticking to it is eating more mindfully. Would you agree? Is that right? Yeah, I would not choose a weight goal. And the nice thing about mindfulness is that you can't change something until you can see it.

24:13And a lot of our less desirable habits are also our most unconscious habits, where you don't even notice you're doing the thing until it's done. And that's another place that mindfulness can help just by giving you that pause to say, okay, what are we doing here before your habits have completely run away with you? That's Sandra Amitt. She's a neuroscientist. Her book is called Why Diets Make Us Fat. And you can see her talk at TED.com. On the show today, Resolved. Many of us promise ourselves that we are going to stress less. What does that even mean? Be less reactive when bad things happen? Manage our anger and anxiety better?

25:07Science journalist Catherine Price thinks the answer is simple. Add more play into your daily schedule. And, crucially, redefine your definition of what is fun. Here she is on the TED stage in Vancouver in 2022. So you might think that you're already having plenty of fun. And that's because in our everyday speech, we often use the word fun to describe anything we do with our leisure time, even if it's not actually enjoyable and in fact a waste of time. So for example, we scroll through social media for fun, even though doing so often makes us feel bad about kind of everything. Or we'll say, that was so fun, we should do that again soon.

25:52In response... In response to things that weren't that fun and that we don't want to do again, ever. But it's not really our fault that we're a little bit sloppy about how we use the word fun, because even the dictionary doesn't get it quite right. You know, it says that fun is amusement or enjoyment or lighthearted pleasure. It's something for kids to have in play areas. It makes it sound like it's frivolous and optional. But when people recount the memories in which they had the most fun, they tell you about some of the most joyful and treasured memories of their lives. So in reality, fun is not just lighthearted pleasure.

26:37It's not just for kids, and it is definitely not frivolous. Instead, fun is the secret to feeling alive. So the first thing we need to start with is the fact that fun is a feeling and it's not an activity. When people do have fun, when they experience this feeling, it's actually very easy to recognize because people who are having fun look like they're being illuminated from within. It's radiant. In fact, when I asked my daughter when she was about five years old what color fun would be, she said sunshine. So what is this sunshine? You know, what is this feeling that we call fun? Well, when people tell me their stories about fun, it's really interesting because the details are all different and often quite mundane, but the energy running through them is the same.

27:26And there are three factors that are consistently present. And those three factors are playfulness, connection, and flow. So by playfulness, I do not mean you have to play games. I just mean having a lighthearted attitude of doing things for the sake of doing them and not caring too much about the outcome, letting go of perfectionism. Connection refers to the feeling of having a special shared experience. And I do think it's possible in some circumstances to have fun alone, but in the majority of stories that people tell me about their peak fun memories, another person is involved. And that's true even for introverts.

28:03And then flow is the state where we are so engaged and focused on whatever we're doing that we can even lose track of time. You can think about an athlete in the middle of a game or like a musician playing a piece of music. It's when we're in the zone. It's possible to be in flow and not have fun, like if you're arguing, but you cannot have fun if you're not in flow. So playfulness, connection, and flow all feel great on their own. But when we experience all three at once, something magical happens. We have fun. And that doesn't just feel good. It is good for us. In fact, fun does so many amazingly good things for us that I personally believe that fun is not just the result of human thriving.

28:43It's a cause. Fun is energizing. Fun also makes us present. A lot of us put a lot of work into trying to be more present. You know, we do yoga classes, we meditate, and that is all great. But the fact that fun is a flow state means that when we are having fun, we simply are present. There's no other way for it to happen. Fun also makes us healthier. Now, being lonely and stressed out, as many of us have been, causes hormonal changes in our bodies that increase our risks for disease. But when we have fun, we're relaxed and we're more socially connected, both of which have the opposite effect. And then lastly, fun is joyful.

29:24You know, we all so desperately want to be happy. We read books about happiness, we download apps about happiness, but when we are in a moment of having fun, we are happy. So it makes me think that perhaps the secret to long-term happiness is just to have more everyday moments of fun. So how do we do that? How do we have more fun? So to start with, reduce distractions in order to increase flow. Anything that distracts you is going to kick you out of flow and prevent you from having fun. And what's the number one source of distraction for most of us these days? Your phone. So today I want to challenge you to keep your phone out of your hand as much as possible so that you can take me up on my second suggestion, which is to increase playfulness by finding opportunities to rebel.

30:08I'm talking about finding ways to break the rules of responsible adulthood and give yourself permission to get a kick out of your own life. So for example, one person told me that some of the most fun she'd had in recent memory happened on a Friday morning when she and some of her friends ditched their work and their childcare responsibilities, tucked flasks into their purses, and snuck out to a 10.30 a.m. showing of the movie Bad Moms.

30:37So lastly, here's one more thing that you can do today to start having more fun. Treat fun as if it is important, because it is. I've been doing this myself for a couple of years now, and it's amazing to see how many areas of my life fun has touched. You know, I'm more creative and more productive. Making sure that I am having enough fun has made me a better partner, and a better parent, and a better friend. And it has convinced me that my daughter was right. Fun is sunshine. It's a distillation of life's energy. And the more often we experience it, the more we will feel like we're actually alive.