The Top 7 Belly Fat Burning Hacks For 2024 That Are PROVEN To Work!

25:47So as a consequence, you lost your impulse control and that's why you start to then say, you know, when I'm sleep deprived, at the food sort of buffet, I'm not going to do salad, I'm just going to that pizza looks awful good or that pasta with the create, I'm just going to go into that all go. So so you're it's what we call a patent in terms of brain activity in neuroscience of hedonic eating that your brain goes into this hedonic desire profile. So now we understood it's not just hormones in the body, it's also changes in the brain, then came the finding that there's another chemical in the body that's responsible.

26:28And this comes on to cannabis. When people, when people, when people that you may know have smoked cannabis, they'll often say I get fish, just hungry, I get the munchies, I get really hungry. That's no coincidence because cannabis will stimulate appetite. Now we all have naturally occurring cannabis compounds in our brain and our bodies, they are called endocannabinoids, endomining comes from insiders, whereas the cannabis that comes externally when you sort of smoke it or take edibles.

27:10So endocannabinoids do many things for the brain and the body, but one of the things that they do is control your appetite and your hunger. And what we found is that when you sleep deprived individuals, these naturally occurring endocannabinoids rocketed up by over 20 % cranking up people's appetite. And so these three ways lead you to start packing on, you know, when insufficient sleep is occurring, when sleep gets short, your waistline typically starts to expand and we now understand the reasons if that wasn't bad enough. It is the final. Yeah, you just stop, man. Honestly, the last thing that we discovered is that let's say that you're trying to be really careful and you're trying to diet and you're trying to lose weight.

27:59If you're not getting sufficient sleep, then 60 % of all of the weight that you lose will come from lean muscle mass. Oh, God. And not fat. Not the muscle. I know exactly. So in other words, when you are dieting, but you are under slept, you lose what you want to keep, which is muscle, and you keep what you want to lose, which is fat. So again, it's not an ideal situation. Sleep is important. I get it. I'm sold. How do I... My question is, what are the things that in the modern society are standing in the way of sleep? We've touched on some of them, loose sleep, but some of them are like big, obvious things.

28:45The things that you would suggest doing, very actionable things we could do straight away to improve our chances of having that healthy, deep sleep that we need to be optimal in every regard of our health and performance. There's probably, I think, five standard tips, what we call sleep hygiene that you can do. And then I'll come on to maybe just some unconventional tips that we've sort of touched on. And we've spoken about many of these. The first thing I would recommend people to do, and this is why when some people say, what about this new sleep supplement? Or, you know, it's, it's faulty quid for this bottle of these sleep, new sleep natural medications.

29:22I'm going to give it a try. I would say try these tried and true things first before you spend your money on supplements. The first thing is regularity. Go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time. No matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend, your brain expects regularity. It thrives best in the conditions of regularity. When you give it regularity, you can improve the quantity and the quantity of your sleep. The second thing is get some darkness at night. As I said, we don't get enough darkness in the modern world. And so the trick I would offer, and I don't use it, I don't like the word hack, but the suggestion would be, in the last hour before bed, try this experiment for everyone listening for the next week, dim down half of the lights or switch off half of the lights or even three quarters of the lights in your home, in the last hour before bed.

30:18All of the lights in every room. In all of the rooms, switch off almost all of the light. Now, I'm not suggesting be unsafe and walk around in the darkness in the last hour. That's not what I want to say. Just dim down, switch off half of the lights. You will be surprised at how sleepy that darkness will make you feel. And it's also an incredible behavioral trigger to signal to your brain that it is time for sleep, that darkness is around me. That's the second tip is darkness. The third tip is temperature. Most people sleep in an ambient bedroom temperature that is too high. And you need to aim for a bedroom temperature of about 18, 18 and a half degrees Celsius around about 65 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit, if I'm probably butchering the mathematics there on that.

31:11But you need to get cool. Now you can worth the socks, you can have a hot water bottle. That's fine, but the ambient needs to be cold. Because you need to drop your core body temperature and your brain temperature by about one degree Celsius to fall asleep and stay asleep. And it's the reason that you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot. So make your bedroom cold, make it dark like a cave. The fourth question would be, what we've, or fourth suggestion would be walk it out and we've spoken about this. The 30 minute rule, you know, get up, do something different or meditate.

31:50You know, don't lie in bed awake for too long. Then the final two things we've spoken about, well, we've spoken about caffeine. We haven't spoken about alcohol, but let me just say as the headline of it, alcohol is not a sleep aid. Many people use it as a sleep aid. It is not your friend. Alcohol again is a sedative, so it knocks you out. The second is that it fragments your sleep. So you wake up, your sleep is littered with all of these small awakenings. Most of them you don't remember because there's too brief. But it makes for miserable, lousy quality sleep. And the final thing is that alcohol is very good at blocking your REM sleep or your dream sleep, which we know is critical for many other functions as well.

32:29So alcohol is not your friend, that's the sort of the final tip. Again, you know, just if you're with friends, have a glass of red wine. Just know, okay, my sleep's not going to be great. No, thank you, Matt. Yeah. I'm joking. I'm joking. Yeah, I'm joking. Of course. It's just, you know, live life, too. Of course, yeah, I'm not saying that. The fourth most replayed moment is a moment from my conversation with the world leading neuroscientist, the man who is scanned more brains than anybody else, Dr. Daniel Aiman, who is a favourite on the Diroverseo. And he tells us very, very clearly how to grow a healthier brain.

33:06I can change my brain. It's the most exciting lesson that I've learned. You're not stuck. I'm not stuck. With the brain I had, you're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. I can prove it. In fact, every day, what I've come to believe, you're making your brain better, or you're making it worse. Let's start that. By what you're doing. What things make the brain worse? What are the common things that most of us do without thinking that make the brain worse? When my daughter, Chloe, was in second grade, I went to her classroom, and I wrote 20 things on the board. And I went separate them for me.

33:52Good for your brain, bad for a brain. Seven -year -olds. They got 19 out of 20, right? So most people know. The only thing they got wrong was orange juice. They put it in the healthy category. When, in fact, when is it rational to unwrap fruit sugar from its fiber source? Because it turns toxic in your body. So I'm not a fan of fruit juice. I'm a fan of fruit, not fruit juice. What's behind about sugar for the brain? It's pro -inflammatory. Which makes you diabetic. But I mean, as it relates to the brain, why is orange juice or the ice cream bad for my brain? Because it's ultimately going to give you high blood sugar levels, which are roadier blood vessels, and you're going to have lower blood flow to your brain.

34:47That's a bad thing. I mean, there's so many things about it. So it's addictive. It's pro -inflammatory. It makes it more likely to have diabetes in obesity. So 72 % of Americans are overweight, 42 % are obese. I've published three studies on 35 ,000 people. As your weight goes up, the actual physical size and function of your brain goes down. That should scare the fat off anyone. I used to be chubby. But when I figured out that connection, I'm like, oh no. It was that that gave me the motivation to drop about 25 pounds. And so sugar is the gateway drug to diabetes in obesity. And so not to mention inflammation, which is the cause of depression and dementia.

35:49So you want to avoid things that cause low blood flow, caffeine, nicotine. Caffeine? Caffeine constricts blood flow to the brain. And what does that do to my brain? Well, constricts blood flow. So you're going to get less blood flow. And remember, I showed you that progression with age? No. You don't want that. You want to do things that increase blood flow to your brain. So exercise. Ganko. It's just one of the supplements I'm going to give you. Eat foods like beets, oregano, rosemary, cinnamon. They increase blood flow. While we're on blood flow, 40 % of 40 -year -olds have erectile dysfunction.

36:3570 % of 70 -year -olds have erectile dysfunction. With that means if you have blood flow problems anywhere, it means they're everywhere. And so I'm like, no. And it means either you're too sedentary, you're overweight, you're smoking or having too much caffeine, or using marijuana because marijuana lowers blood flow to the brain. And so just in that one of the 11, it's exercise. Ganko. For you, not for everybody, but for you hyperbaric oxygen, those three things will make a big difference in blood flow. Ganko. Ganko. What is that? It's a supplement. What does it do? Increases blood flow. To the brain.

37:31The prettiest brains I've ever seen take ganko. There's actually a spec study. They gave people 120 milligrams of ganko twice a day, significant improvement in blood flow to the brain. And so one of the supplements I'm going to give you, we have ganko. I've taken it every day for the last 20 years, at least. And then this is where the US government got an F for the pandemic, loneliness accelerates dementia and brain problems. And so when they isolated us, the whole significant increase in brain problems. So get connected to other people. The eye in bright minds is inflammation. So what increases inflammation?

38:23Low omega -3 fatty acid levels. And we are deficient. 93 % of the population is deficient in omega -3 fatty acids. 93%. So all of us should be either eating more fish or taking an omega -3 supplement, like fish oil, gum disease. Like who knew? Like I wasn't really that good at taking care of my gums until I started reading the studies. You have gum disease, you have inflammation, you're more likely to get depressed and have dementia. The third most replayed moment is a moment for my conversation with Gary Brecker, where he lays out how you can become a superhuman, strip the fat off your body, and get yourself healthy with free, easy, simple exercises that will cost you nothing at all.

39:17When I heard the story about Dana White, and I saw he had gone from respectfully being a man that had a little bit of weight to having these six pack abs on Instagram. Of course, the six pack isn't the outcome. As you've said, it's the stuff going on inside here. That's really the transformation. But what can someone who's just heard that at home, where do they start with getting extending their life by triple and getting the... So he also started something called a superhuman protocol. And superhuman protocol is using magnetism, oxygen, and light. So the only things that we really get from other nature, the big benefit we get from other nature, is we get magnetism from the earth, we get oxygen from the air, we get light from the sun.

39:58The truth is most of us are not contacting the surface of the earth that much anymore. So he bought a $150 ,000 worth of equipment, a PMF mat, an oxygen, what's called a hypermax oxygen, to do exercise with oxygen therapy, and a red light therapy bed. And I had him use that equipment every single day, seven days a week. But if your listeners want to do it for free, you can take off your shoes and contact the surface of the earth. And I'm talking about bare feet on soil, dirt, grass, sand. Because earthing and grounding is a very real thing. We actually discharge into the earth. We actually human beings build up a charge.

40:36Do you know that pH, the acid alkaline scale, pH stands for potential hydrogen. It's a charge. It's a complete fallacy that you can get alkaline by drinking alkaline water. That's the biggest marketing method I've ever sold to the public. But you can get alkaline by contacting the surface of the earth. So if you don't have 150 grand, which I don't expect to anybody listening to this podcast, it's been 150 grand, but he did. I said, you need a PMF mat so you can be alkaline. You need to spend 10 minutes a day breathing 95 % out to under mild exercise and you need to lay in a red light therapy bed.

41:09So in the absence of the superhuman protocol, you can become superhuman by contacting the earth and by learning to do breath work. Let's talk about breath work. I spend eight minutes every day doing a very specific series of breath work. People do not realize the power of something that is so accessible, so free, and so easy to do. They want things to be more complicated, but it's not. And when I said the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease, it's absolutely true. Remember that every elevated emotional state that a human being can experience actually has in its molecular structure. Oxygen is a component of that emotion.

41:48So if you look at the difference between passion, elation, joy, arousal, libido, and anger, for example, it's usually only one neurotransmitter and the presence of oxygen. The reason why no human being is ever woken up laughing is because you don't have the oxidative state to experience laughter right out of deep sleep, but can you wake up angry? Yes, because anger doesn't require oxygen. So every morning, contact the surface of the earth and then spend eight minutes doing I do a Wim Hofstyle breath work. I give credit where credits do. He's the father of breath work as far as I'm concerned. So I do three rounds of 30 deep breaths, like obnoxiously deep breaths.

42:26And I start by trying to take my belly button and pull my belly button out towards the wall. Imagine there's a string pulling your belly button towards the wall. And then you fill from the lobes along to the apex along and then you exhale and just relax. Oh, God knows what they think we're doing after. Right outside this podcast, they're like a bunch of freak. I knew it was a cult. I knew he was a cult leader. So you do three rounds of 30 breaths on the 30th breath, you exhale and you hold. Allow the carbohydrate rep to accept their derisette. When you don't feel you can hold it anymore, you take a deep breath in.

43:10You hold again and then you let it out slow. And you start again. I would suggest that you start with three rounds of five breaths. Then work to 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30. If you get lightheaded, this is a good sign that the oxygen tension is changing in your brain. If your fingers and toes get tingly, this is a good sign that you're changing the oxygen tension. If you feel some kind of heat, temperature change in your neck, these are all great signs. You will get to the point where you can actually hold your breath for two or three minutes, sometimes four minutes between rounds of breath work. And then the last thing is to expose yourself to natural sunlight.

43:47First thing in the morning, the first 45 minutes of the day, God gives us a very, very special type of light. It's called first light. There's no UVA. There's no UVB rays in this light. So that it's not the damaging rays from the sun. It still generates vitamin D3. It has a positive effect on cortisol, on vitamin D3. First light is the best way to reset your circadian rhythm. So by contacting the surface of the earth, doing breath work and getting first light, you can get to the same place that Dana White did with 150 grand in equipment. What about oxygen masks? Because I'll be honest, when I read about the Dana story, I went on Amazon soon after, and I was like, I'm just going to buy an oxygen canister.

44:25Good idea, bad idea. So what you want to do is, you know, you get an oxygen concentrator, which takes 21 % oxygen from, which is what the concentration at sea level. It turns it into 95 % O2 and it fills this bag. And it can refill this bag over and over and over again. Okay, I use one called the hypermax. You can see it on my Instagram. And you plug it in, you turn it on and it fills this bag. And then you go in, you put an oxygen mask on, and you exercise for 10 minutes. Only 10 minutes. Cycle for three minutes. Sprint for 30 seconds. Cycle for three minutes. Sprint for 30 seconds. Cycle three minutes.

45:00Sprint 30 seconds and you're done. And what this does is it raises something called the partial pressure, the storage of oxygen in your blood. The only two -time Nobel laureate prize winner in medicine, Dr. Otto Warburg, won both of his Nobel prizes for us work in exercise with oxygen therapy. You want to be a superhuman, do mild exercise every day while breathing 95 % O2. And it's important that you're exercising. And then after that, you move into a red light therapy bed, photo biomodulation. So, you know, if you don't have access to a hypermax oxygen machine, just do the breath work, get the breath in, you know, exchange the oxygen tension in the tissues and expose yourself to first light.

45:37What about cold cold with the plunger? So, on the huge fan of cold water plunging, probably not for the reasons why you think. You know, I also sit on the board of the NFL Alumni Association Athletica as a health services director, you know, there was a time when we used to think that putting athletes in cold water after exercise was good because of its anti -inflammatory effects. We know now that that's only about 15 % of the benefit. The majority of the benefit comes from something called a cold shock protein. If you really want to be fascinated, Google cold shock proteins. These are reserved proteins that are in your liver.

46:09They're dumped into the bloodstream in an effort to save your life when you put yourself in cold water. They scour the body of free radical oxidation. They increase the rate of protein synthesis, muscle repair. They are free. You get them when you put yourself in cold water. I don't know what the Celsius conversion is, but I use 50 degrees for three minutes, minimum, six minutes maximum. Cold. Yes. It's actually not that cold. I mean, you know, I see people getting in 37, 38 degree water. There's no evidence that I've read that shows that cold water is better. You get a peripheral vasoconstriction, so it forces all the oxygen into the core and up to the brain.

46:43You get an activation of something called brown fat. Thermogenesis comes from brown fat. For the women that are listening, for some reason I seem to ensnare the women when I say this, remember that the definition of a calorie is a measure of heat. The definition of a calorie is the amount of energy it takes to raise one cubic centimeter of water, one degree centigrade. If a calorie is a measure of heat, then this means that when it heats leaving your body, calories are leaving your body. So if there is nothing, nothing, no amount of exercise hits cardio, no type of cardiovascular or weight training that comes anywhere close to immersing yourself in cold water, in terms of what will strip fat off your body fast.

47:26If you want to strip that off your body, getting cold water three to six minutes a day. That's fascinating. Because the oxygen rushes to my head, that's why it has a really profound impact on mood. That's why it has a very profound impact on mood. Because if you think about it, what's the reason why we need deep sleep? What happens in deep sleep that's so special? There's a secondary oxygen transfer. We transfer oxygen from the periphery, from the extremities, to the brain. Remember the brains are non metabolic organ. So in other words, it's unlike a muscle. If I pick up a weight and start to work out my muscle, my arm, my body will send more blood, more amino acids, more oxygen to that muscle because it's working.

48:00Well, if I'm sitting at my computer and I'm watching reruns of the Simpsons, or I'm sitting at my computer and I'm solving the most complex joint venture agreement, partnership agreement with all kinds of mathematical equations, my brain gets the same amount of nutrients, same amount of blood flow, same amount of oxygen. So it eats the same meal whether or not it's in a dead sprint or whether or not it's just chilling on the couch. Except in deep sleep and when you're in cold water, because it's forcing the oxygen up to the brain. The second most replayed moment is a moment from my conversation with Dr.

48:36Tim Specter, a favorite on the DiroVocEO. And here he talks about health more holistically and some of the biggest myths that most of us believe that are currently standing in our way. We've got a fitness group amongst some of my friends. It's about 10 of us in it. And we've been tracking how often we work out and how frequently we work out in the workouts that we do. And one of the things I have to say is pretty much no one in the group has lost any weight. We've been doing this for a year. And that kind of bucks what you would fit. So the only time that I lost weight was actually when I went on the keto diet.

49:10I went from 14 stone eight to 13 stone eight in roughly several weeks, but exercise and exercising for almost religiously for the last two and a half years doesn't really seem to impact my weight at all. In the way that the fitness experts might tell me on Instagram, what's your stance on the role that exercise plays in weight loss? It has very little role in weight loss. All the studies, long -term studies show it doesn't help weight loss. And it's been grossly exaggerated as an easy fix for our obesity problem. Exercise doesn't help weight loss. All the studies show that. The only caveat to that is if you have changed your diet, improved your diet and you've lost some weight, maintaining some exercise does help prevent it going back up again.

50:02But as on its own, if you don't change your diet, it's of no use. And that's well known now by all the obesity experts and all the studies. Does sugar make us fat? Is that the culprit? Is that one of the main things that's contributing to? No, again, that's reductionism. But the reason exercise doesn't work is important to realize this is because we all know this that you go for a walk, build up hunger before a meal. That's what your parents told you. And everything about exercise is after it, your body slows down. Your metabolism slows down. And it tries to regain the energy that you've lost.

50:49That's just our evolution. And so that's why it's a... You're not going to... It's great for your health. I know I exercise. Fantastic for your mood. It's great for your heart. And he can't say all kinds of things. We should all do it. But absolutely not if your goal is weight loss. You have to do something about changing your diet. And I think that's the big, a huge myth, particularly perpetitive by gyms and fitness apps and everything else. And it is complete nonsense. I read that when you looked at studies over 30 years and you looked at how many studies had been done on the relationship of exercise and weight versus things like sugar and weight.

51:30There was 12 more... 12 times more studies done on the relationship of exercise and weight versus sugar and weight. And why is that? Why is there less research done on the latter? I think that's the influence of governments and the food companies and the drink companies. So a lot of the exercise research done in the last 20 years was sponsored by large corporations who wanted to make this link between exercise and weight loss. So that they could continue to sell sugary ultra processed foods and drinks. And just say it's childhood obesity because we don't have playgrounds and we don't encourage this.

52:21And that's why the coax and the pepsies are always there at the Olympic sponsored Olympic events and associating themselves with sport. And they gave hundreds of millions to various physiology departments, sports departments, nutrition departments to do research in this area. Basically it was really hard to get anyone to do research into how sugary drinks make you gain weight or cause problems because they... The amount of money for nutrition has been abysmally poor from governments. And that's why the first ever study of ultra processed food in a controlled trial was only about three years ago.

53:05And it's been around for 30, 40 years. So such is the power of that lobby that it doesn't distort the research in a sort of either way but they point it to make sure that the researchers are working in an area that they want people to work in and distracting them, keeping away from talking about sugars or even artificial sweeteners which in my view are nearly as bad because they're sort of hidden. And deflecting us from the idea that yes, giving kids sugary drinks or even artificial sweet drinks is going to be bad for them and cause obesity. So I've been... I've cut out sugary drinks about a year ago.

53:51I still have the same brands but I have the no sugar version. Oh dear. Oh shit, what do you mean, idea? All the summary of the trials shows that if you take young adults and kids and they were say on two cans of full sugar sodas and you're changing through the diet version, there's no real difference in weight or metabolic changes in their blood. You will go to the dentist less so you don't get as many fillings. And yet you should be gaining 300 calories if you were doing two cans a day. So it doesn't work out as it should do and that's because of the extra... these chemicals are not inert. So the sweeteners, in kids they changed their brains to give them...

54:47they want more sweetness in their food. So it could reflect your wish for your late night milk chocolate, who knows. And it makes... very difficult... trained kids to have more bitter foods or sour foods if they've got these artificial sweeteners in their diet all the time. But they've now shown that all these sweeteners actually affect your gut microbes. So even stevia, these so -called healthy ones, have an effect on your gut microbes and they're not inert. So we know that saccharin and sucralose also cause spikes in your blood sugar. When I did it, you know, have a trace. They're not supposed to but they actually do things they're not supposed to.

55:33So we know very little about these products. And my view is that they are harmful, probably not as bad as having the sugar. But they are absolutely not a health drink. And we should be encouraging people to have, you know, teas and kombucha and more bitter tasting, interesting flavors and foods than just this ultra sweet chemical concoctions. This sugar conglomerate that have been funding much of the research that points towards some of the things you were talking about there. That's also the conglomerate that wants us to believe the calories in, calories out approach. Because if I just view every...

56:16all foods is kind of equal and on this sort of calorie number, then I can drink some of the sugary fizzy drinks and some of the processed foods. As long as I keep it within that sort of calorie deficit, I'll be fine. And so is that sugar conglomerate, is the processed food conglomerate for the calorie model? Absolutely. They need that, right? They absolutely, it's vital, you know, zero calories or one calorie, you know, on the can, that's what you see. And you know, you're fooling people into thinking this is a healthy drink and, oh, you know, if I used to have full cocoa pepsi and now having the diet version, I'm getting 300 calories less a day, I should lose weight.

56:55It's exactly what they've been doing and they're also desperate to show that artificial sweeteners are really healthy and they come down on anyone who tries to say that they're, you know, could be any way dangerous. And yet they're not obliged to test them. So none of the chemicals added really go through rigorous testing on how they affect our gut microbes. And this is, you know, their testing mechanism haven't changed. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is net sweet.

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58:19That's netsweet .com slash Bartlett. In 50 years. And here is the single most replayed moment as it relates to health on the diave CEO of 2023. So the first thing I came up against, because this was around the time of the financial crisis, was the lack of understanding of the brain body connection. So these high performing executives were kind of acting like their body was just the vehicle that was moving their brain around from meeting to meeting. And both disrespecting their physical health, but also not understanding that what they are actually really being paid for was to use their brain. And they weren't creating the best conditions for that brain to operate in.

59:05And I'm talking about really basic things like sleep and a good diet and hydration and not being sedentary, managing your stress, etc. So you know, this tiny organ, if it's not in an environment that is giving it the best chance of doing its job, it's not going to and a crack's going to appear somewhere. And the first time I really kind of had a big confrontation with a bank was when people were dropping dead on the trading floor of heart attacks. And they asked me to work more in my capacity as a former medical doctor to help with physical stuff. And I said, I can't do that if we don't address the mental and emotional peace, because that's what's causing this.

59:51And they just could not get that. What did you want to do with those people in a specific and practical sense? If you could have been in charge of preventing them from dropping dead on the trading floor, where would you have started? The understanding that stress, so everything that you're experiencing mentally and emotionally that's challenging, and things like a lot of travel, which is challenging if you're body, that that raises levels of the hormone cortisol, which comes from your adrenal glands. And that cortisol causes around your blood through your entire body and brain. And the brain has receptors for understanding what's going on in terms of threat to your survival.

1:00:34So in a 24 hour cycle, depending on your age and your gender, there's a normal range for cortisol. So it can go up and down like this. You know, if something challenging happens, we need to adapt and rise to meet that challenge. But when that level is above the top range all the time, these receptors in your brain basically think that there's an imminent threat to your survival. So there's this whole cascade of hormones. And basically cortisol causes inflammation in the body. So inflammation of your vascular system, inflammation around your heart and everything else got and other things. But particularly around that time we were seeing a lot of heart attacks caused by stress.

1:01:15This was in the absence of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoking. It was all stress. Once upon a time I googled, because I had a thesis, I googled, is stress contagious. And it came up and it said it was contagious. Is it contagious in what circumstances do we need to be aware of that contagion? And more importantly, how and why is it contagious? Okay, I will tell you the answer to that, but I'm going to ask you a question first. How have you ever walked into a room with someone? And by the time you've left that meeting with them, you just feel so drained. Okay, so you know the feeling.

1:01:54So I'll tell you how it works physiologically. I'm going to start with something else to like build you up to this story. So did you know that women who lived together or work closely together will synchronize their menstrual periods within two or three months? So whenever I want to explain something that's complex or I don't actually know the current neuroscience, I always take it back to what happened in ancient times. So when we were living in the cave, the men hunted and gathered and lived quite nomadically. So sometimes they would go away for months at a time. And in those days, the most fundamental important thing for the survival of the human species was that the alpha male must pass on his genes.

1:02:40So if he was going to be away for months and he couldn't, you know, that there weren't men there to defend the women from predators, maybe there was going to be a spell of the ice age and they were all freeze to death or they wouldn't have food. And he needed to make sure that at least five women were impregnated with his sperm at the same time. So that if there was a food shortage or there was like still birth or miscarriage or whatever, at least one out of five would survive. So to be able to do that, they had to be fertile at the same time. So that's why that mechanism exists. Now we don't need that mechanism now, but it's still wired into the way that we operate.

1:03:22So those sex steroid hormones like estrogen and progesterone, they leak out of our sweat about this far around us. And that's why if you're living with another woman or if you're sitting across the desk every day, then particles of hormone from my sweat would go into the through the skin of the other woman. If she's within what distance? I mean, it's not you wouldn't have to be sitting next to each other. If you live together, that means you're interacting enough that it would happen. Okay. So particles are not if you work together. If you work together and you sit right next to each other every day, then it does happen too.

1:03:57So, you know, in a small office that's got like six girls in it, that the menstrual synchronization will happen. Interestingly, it's led by the alpha female. So, yeah. So you can you can work out if you don't know already who the alpha female is. Well, if you know, basically let's say my cycles don't change and everyone says, oh, I got my period early or I haven't had my period yet, but now it started. Then that would mean that probably I was the alpha female. How does the body know who the alpha female is? That will be to do the levels of testosterone. Why did the body, why does that matter who the alpha female is?

1:04:33Why does it matter that they think up with her? I don't know if it really matters. I think it's just a case of physiology. So it's a little bit like in the troops of gorillas, the stress levels of the silver back gorilla affect the other gorillas more than gorillas who appears to each other. So there is, we have a natural hierarchy. It must be related to survival as well. So she was probably the person who the alpha male was going to impregnate first? Probably. So everyone needs to kind of fall in line because when she starts having sex, they need to be ready. Yeah. And also it will probably be to do with things like survival genes.

1:05:15So it will be the people with the hardiest genes because that's what you want to pass on as well. Okay, make sense. Make sure it's resilient. Okay, so where were we? Just dressing contagion. You know, the hormones and the menstrual cycle. So basically cortisol is a hormone that works in that same way. So cortisol is the main stress hormone. And this one doesn't matter if you're male or female, but it does matter where you are in the hierarchy of the organization as I just mentioned.

1:05:42So usually in that conversation that I mentioned to you where you go into a room and you just feel completely drained afterwards. Usually the person that comes out feeling drained is less senior than the person that's had that effect on them. And that's why this is so crucial to leadership because your stress levels as a leader as a CEO are going to have more impact on everybody else than the rest of the people put together basically. So managing your stress is obviously important for you. But it's important in terms of what happens to other people. And the first issue I came up against was CEOs and CFOs that said, well, I won't show them that I'm stressed.

1:06:25I won't tell them what's happening with the numbers. I won't display emotions in front of them. And I said, they're still going to know physiologically. It's going to impact them. So now you really have to do something about it. And the other thing about cortisol, which is quite funny. Well, one of the side effects is quite funny is that as a survival mechanism, it will help you to store fat around your abdomen. So again, in the cave, if you were potentially going to not find food for a month, then if you had extra fat around your abdomen, you could digest that and survive till you could find food.

1:07:05So with my clients and financial services, it got to a point where as soon as I walked into the room, they just lift their t -shirt up and say, now you know how I've been in the last month. So stress causes belly fat? Belly fat that's really hard to shift. So again, what I would see with people is that they would say, well, we've put on a bit of weight around the middle, you know, had to loosen the belt a bit. So I've started eating less. I've started like exercising more and I still can't shift it. And again, that's when I would explain this is the impact of cortisol. As long as you're still leaking out extra cortisol, nothing's going to change.

1:07:37So, and like I said, even exercising more or eating better, less or differently, whatever it is, wouldn't shift that fat. You had to get to the root cause. You had to reduce the cortisol. For any of you that are still here, I have a bonus moment for you. I often get asked what is my favorite episode of the DiroVocio of all time. And I often try and avoid that question because I don't want to pick one particular episode. It's kind of like picking your children. However, because you've gotten here, I'm going to reveal it to you and I'm going to play you a moment from that conversation. My favorite ever episode on the DiroVocio of all time is Episode 101.

1:08:18And it just so happens to be the most shared episode we've ever had of all time on WhatsApp. And I know that sounds a little bit obscure. But the interesting thing about WhatsApp is it's one to one typically. So it's typically one friend sending it to a family member or to a friend or something like that. And for it to be the most transferred between one person and another, I think is telling about the value of that conversation. Here is one of the most important moments from my favorite episode on the DiroVocio of all time. To earn somewhat happiness as you have to understand the cause of it.

1:08:58Yes. And you write about that extensively and solve for happy. So what is the cause of unhappiness as you see it, especially if you're building sort of machine learning applications that are going to, you know, solve, you know, make people arrive at content with all happiness in a personalized way. We must be able to know what's causing this lack of allow me a bit of time to explain it because it's simple when we get it, but it's not simple to get to it. So happiness is very predictable. If you look back at any point in your life where you ever felt happy, there is one commonality across all of those moments that can actually be documented in a mathematical equation.

1:09:35You've never felt happy because of a specific event in your life. Take, for example, rain. Rain doesn't make you happy or unhappy. There is no inherent value of happiness in rain. Rain makes you happy when you want to author your plans and it makes you unhappy when you want a sunbathe. And so it's not just the event, rain. It's the comparison between the event and an expectation in your mind of how life should be. If you're worried about your plans, then life should be generous to me and get me rain so I can water the plans. And if life does that, then life meets your expectations and you're happy.

1:10:15And so happiness in that sense becomes equal to or greater than, so it's really mathematics, your perception of the events of your life, minus your expectations of how life should be. And apply that to anything. So my favorite example is nature. We're all happy in nature. Why are we all happy in nature? You go out there and there are ants and there are flies and trees are crooked and there are shrubs everywhere and bushes. And it's just really not that hedge than organized. But that's what we expect. So nature's chaos is what we expect nature to be. And so we feel happy. Nobody ever sits in front of the ocean and says, I like the view but please mute the sound.

1:11:02You just take it. It's the monotonous sound and the view and the wind and the sun and the whole experience. And because of that, happiness becomes very different than what was defined to us. What was defined to us is that happiness is found in gathering at the pub or a party or an activity or some kind of pleasure or fun or elation or whatever that is. That's not at all true. I call these the state of escape. Happiness as per the definition of the happiness equation is events equal to or beating expectations, life going my way. And so basically happiness is that calm and peacefulness you feel when you're okay with life as it is.

1:11:51It doesn't really matter what life is. What matters is that you can be okay with it. So you take any example, if your boss is annoying and your expectation is yeah, bosses are annoying. This is what life is about. They become bosses because they're annoying. And so if that's your expectation, you're going to look at it and go like, yeah, I need to learn the skill of managing annoying bosses. And if that's the case, then you're not going to be upset about it. Similarly, anything else, if you look at it, then it's not just the event. It's your perception of the event. So you have something to influence.

1:12:33It's not just the event. Your partner might say something hurtful on Friday at 4 p .m. That's the event. My partner said something hurtful. At Sunday morning, you tell yourself he or she doesn't love me anymore. That's your perception of the event. That's not actually the event. The event is something hurtful was said. But your perception of the event is your work. It's your brain adding color to it. And then you compare that to your expectations. You compare my bosses annoying to my boss shouldn't be annoying. Where did you get that from? So we blur the happiness equation. We break the happiness equation because of what I call the six and seven.

1:13:13Six grand illusions and seven blind spots. Which are the six grand illusions are basically call them pathways that the modern world teaches us to navigate the modern world. That are illusions are not true. Take for example control. Everyone knows that to succeed in the modern world, you have to learn to control certain events. So you start to believe that the way to succeed in life is to control everything. But the truth is, even if you go down to the basics of physics, that we never are in control. That the absolute design of nature itself, of the universe itself, is entropy and chaos. That's the actual design.

1:13:57And so if you try to control it, your bound to be disappointed. A lot of events are going to miss your expectations. And yes, I'm not saying don't control anything at all. But start to understand that you're going to be selective because you have a finite amount of effort. And by the way, even if you're selective and you try to control everything, sometimes things will fall out of control. And that should be your expectation. Once you get that right, that was my biggest illusion. I am a mathematician, I am a software developer, I am a physicist, I am an engineer, and I am a senior executive. It doesn't get worse than that.

1:14:37I'm like the worst, absolute the worst. I used to give my wonderful wife, I swear to you, Stephen, don't judge me. I used to give her a spreadsheet that would tell her when to wash the colors and when to wash the whites based on our average consumption as a family to save the environment. And poor Nibel would actually smile at me and say, sure, baby, I will use this. Of course, I know the hell out of me because that's how crazy you can be when it comes to control. Now, these are the illusions. If you live your life through the illusion of control, good luck finding happiness. So six grand illusions, the illusion of thought, the illusion of self, the illusion of knowledge, the illusion of time, control and fear.

1:15:22Now, that's one side and that disrupts your entire view of what to expect from life because you're expecting life to behave through a lens of an illusion. The other side of it is what I call seven blind spots. And the seven blind spots are not really defects in your brain. As a matter of fact, they are the very design of your brain. Your brain is designed to tell you what's wrong. It's not designed to, if a tiger shows up right here now, my brain has no use whatsoever in telling me, oh my god, look how majestic that animal is. It's a beautiful animal, but my brain will say we're going to die. And we're going to die is the idea that basically makes our brain constantly look for what's wrong.

1:16:11And blur the events of life, you ask a mother and she will say, oh my daughter's been sick all winter. She just had two episodes of flu three days each, but to the caring heart of a mother that needs to be exaggerated to exaggeration is one of the blind spots. Your brain is trying to get you to take action, so it pushes you. It pushes you by exaggerating the event a little bit so that you jump in and take action. And accordingly, the event you're comparing to your comparing the wrong event to the wrong expectation and the happiness equation for the part. Do you need a podcast to listen to next?

1:16:51We've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend absolutely love another recent episode we've done. So I've linked that episode in the description below. I know you'll enjoy it.

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