CAROLINE WILLIAMS: Your Most Underrated Intelligence Center

0:00There's reasons why every human population on the planet pretty much has some kind of synchronized movement or dance in their culture. because it helps to bond us together. Hi, I'm Michael Hyatt. And I'm Megan Hyatt-Miller. And you're listening to The Double Wind Show. And guys, today we just finished the best conversation with Caroline Williams. I can't wait to share it with you. She is a science journalist and longtime contributor to New Scientist, The Guardian, BBC Future, BBC Earth. She's the author of My Plastic Brain, Move, and her newest book called Inner Sense. And she holds degrees in biological sciences and science communication.

0:46Now that sounds very heady, but let me tell you, she's so easy to understand, relatable, and practical. You're going to learn so much. And she's really known for her immersive first-person investigations into neuroscience and health. and specifically the connection between movement, bodily awareness, and mental performance. There's so many takeaways that we had from this conversation. We're going to have a whole list of your own, I promise. Caroline lives in the UK with her family. So without further ado, here's our conversation with Caroline.

1:22Caroline, welcome to the show. We're so thrilled to have you. Thank you so much for having me. This is a topic, a topic about what you've written about in your three books that we are very, very interested in. So the word for the day class is interoception. What does that word actually mean if you break it apart? Where did it come from? When you break it down, it really becomes much less mysterious. So it's about internal receptors, basically. So throughout our body, so the extra receptive senses, they're receiving external information and they're a lot easier to study because obviously we have specific organs, sense organs.

2:02So if you want to know how we see, you look at the eyes and the bit of the brain that we know deals with vision. Same with the other external senses, but the intra receptive senses, we have lots of receptors, sensory receptors throughout our whole body. So the ones for our visceral senses are dealt with by the vagus nerve. So that sort of stomach sensations, fullness, emptiness, rumbles, you know, the lungs expanding and contracting. Pretty much all our internal organs are sort of served by the vagus nerve. Then you've got peripheral nerves that go all the way through your body. But all of these nerves, you don't have like an anxiety set of nerves.

2:39They all have different sensory endings. So it's a lot more complicated trying to pick apart. And the job of putting it all together is sort of in a part of the brain called the insula, which is the interoceptive cortex. And that's where it all gets kind of computed, put together with the extra external information and generates this sense of, OK, how am I feeling right now? How am I doing in the world and what do I need to do to improve my chances of being successful or surviving in our distant past? So would it be fair to say that it's a subcategory of perception? Yes. And I think that most people think of perception as one thing, but you've created some nuance here where there's different kinds of perception, correct?

3:18Yeah. And to make it even more complicated, the way perception is understood now in neuroscience, it's not just sort of the brain sits there waiting for information to come in and then deals with it. The brain is constantly predicting what it expects to be perceiving based on previous experience and just what it would expect for having developed this body and grown in this particular body shape. And so the brain is constantly predicting what's coming in and then it's updating based on live information coming from the body. And then when that happens and nobody understands exactly how this works, if these two things clash, then either the prediction has to change or the signal has to change.

3:57And differences in how that balance happens explains why some people may have, say, panic disorder, where things get out of control and get escalated and other people are able to tamp things down. So it's a kind of body brain back and forth the whole time. So perception isn't a one way process. It's a constant, ongoing thing. Yeah, which also means that just as your eyes can deceive you sometimes and your ears can deceive you, so can your internal senses. So they're not always right, but they're always information. In your three books, you moved from brain plasticity to movement to interoception.

4:30When did you realize that performance just isn't about the brain? There's three books. So in that order, that's where I was following the science. So I've been covering sort of neuroscience and psychology for about 25 years. And me, along with everybody else, back 25 years ago, psychology, the mind, the brain, it was all neck up. Everything was neck up. And, you know, changing anything and getting the best out of yourself was a matter of changing your brain or boosting cognition or doing something from the neck up. And that's where I started, you know, with all the kind of things that bug me about my brain that won't behave.

5:09you know why can't I concentrate when I want to why does creativity happen when it feels like it and not when I need it for a meeting you know all these things why can't I navigate all these things and so I've went on a little journey going around various labs and trying to get into experiment on me but what came out of that was that anything that really changes anything about the way you think and feel has something to do with the body and so I got really intrigued by that and I thought well there must be something more to this than exercise gives you happy hormones okay there must be more to this body brain connection um I thought I wonder if there's any research into how specific kinds of being and using your body affect how you think and feel and there was loads and so that took me to move and then the question arises well why does movement affect how you think can feel so profoundly and the answer really is interoception which is the sense of changes and signals from within your own body so it's a sense it's an inner sense and not many people know we have we all have it it's a rubbish word you know it makes you think of sort of accountancy or something I don't know it's not a sexy word at all but I like to think it's going to be the next big word in sort of these sort of circles when you're trying to think out how to get the best out of yourself because basically anything you do with your body is going to affect the signals that are going from within your body to your brain and that changes how your brain predicts what you're capable of and what's going to happen next and then the whole thing feeds back and forward and back and forward and you know we're not a brain on legs we are a whole organism and the whole thing matters so it's been that's been quite a journey for me to go along that and sort of work all this stuff out so fascinating caroline know we're talking before we press record about who our community is.

6:56People that we're talking to, that you guys were talking to today, are people who, like us, are probably in midlife. You've got a lot on your plate, more on your plate than you really have time to do, but the stuff on your plate really matters. And that tension of, how am I going to get it all done? And I want to perform at my best, because again, there are high stakes on the line and all of that. Why does interoception matter for people like us? Like, why should we be thinking about it as we go into this conversation? Yeah, that's a good question. I think so. I mean, I'm in the same boat as sort of most of your listeners, I think.

7:36You know, midlife children, older parents, you know, sort of trying to juggle everything whilst having a career and keeping our house from turning into complete chaos. And I think where interoception fits in is that we're so conditioned or so used to just sort of powering through. It's like, I've got my to-do list. I'm going to bosh through that. Okay, I'm a bit tired. Nevermind, going to keep going. I feel a bit ill. Nevermind, keep going. You know, I need to eat. I'll just shovel something in. And so we're sort of disconnected from our own bodies. We're so busy trying to keep our heads above water.

8:11And the reason that can become a problem is because if you're always in your head and you don't stop to take a little beat and sort of feel inside, then you can be running on empty, you can be stressed, you can be malnourished, you can be ill, and you're not listening to these signals. And these signals can often be telling you something important about what you need. And the reason that the interoception is important for the mind is because these sensations and feelings are signals that tell us we need something. So hunger is the simplest example. You know, you feel that sensation, I need to go and eat, you know and it motivates you to go and look for food and the idea is that you sense that you identify what the need is you fulfill it and then you go back and move on with your life but with things like stress you know you might be sitting there hunched and stressed all day and after a while you tune out that sensation because it's so habitual you don't notice your breathing shallowly you don't notice your heart's beating in your chest you don't notice some of these sensations and so you can't deal with them you can't think all right what is causing this have I got too much on can I let some of this go is it the people around me that are making me feel uneasy what's what's happening here and once you can tune into that sort of to signals you can get curious about what's causing them and then you have to have a better chance of dealing with it and looking after yourself as well as everybody else so I think that's where it comes in really we're so in our heads we're so overstimulated there's too much information from the media from the world around us.

9:40We've got phones, we've got ping notifications coming. And the way that our attention works, we can either be attending to the world around us. You can either put your attention on the outside world. So these are our extra receptive senses. So the ones we know about receive information from the outside world. So we can either be sort of attending to the outside world or the internal world. You can't be doing it both at the same time. So if you're constantly out there, you can't be in here. And so you need to be able to have the ability to tune in, deal, and then tune back out again. That's where we should ideally be.

10:14But yeah, I'd like to say I'd nailed it, but it's tricky. Have you listened to the telepathy tapes? No, I have not. Should I? Oh my gosh. It's a podcast. Megan, have you listened to it? Yeah. It's a scientist. She got sort of intrigued by telepathy and is it really a thing and started studying autistic children and their ability to communicate. It is crazy, but it's pretty rigorous science too. So it's worth listening to. It's another kind of perception and communication. Well, what's interesting with interoception is that it kind of underlies our sense of empathy as well. So what happens when you're talking to somebody or you're with somebody, we sort of, we mirror their body language, but we also, to some extent, mirror what's going on inside their body.

10:57So if you're with someone who's really upset and in pain, you sort of take on some of that. And we sort of understand each other's feelings by feeling them to a lesser extent ourselves. So it's about knowing yourself, but also has a lot to do with how you react with other people around you and how other people affect you. We're social creatures, you know, we couldn't survive on our own in our sort of ancestors' days. So there's a real important role that other people play in everything from our energy levels to how safe we feel to all sorts of things we're sort of constantly adjusting our own bodies based on what other people are doing and making us feel you know I think about this being particularly important as I think about my own life at this stage there's so much going on you know my body is dramatically changing I'm in the perimenopausal transition right so what's happening in my body is, is just wild, you know, as, as any season with you.

11:57It's like, wow. So that's happening, but there's so much happening in the world around us. It's just like feels unprecedented in our lifetime, you know, various levels. So you're trying to kind of process that there's just so many demands, I think that it can make hearing, I use air quotes to say that, hearing or listening to what's happening in our body and the signals that our body's giving, very difficult because they feel a little scrambled. Maybe if you're a woman in this season, there's so much noise elsewhere. And the problem is if there are important signals that you need to hear, for example, something's not right in your body, or something's not right in your life and your body knows it and is trying to signal you to that.

12:41If you're not aware of how interoception works, if you don't have the ability to be embodied and come below your ears, you know, or your neck and sort of receive those signals, then you can miss really important things like something's wrong here, you know, like a disease, you could miss that your life is out of alignment in some major way that's going to have significant implications. So I think, obviously, there's the science part of this, which we're going to talk a lot about, but this becomes very consequential in our lives, you know, I think that most of us have experienced, you know, a totally cerebral way of being where all we're focused on is our mindset or our thoughts, you know, what we're kind of able to think as a very limited form of intelligence.

13:29It's just not the whole picture and we're missing out on a lot that can both benefit us and protect us from harm. Talking about different life stages, it's been known for a really long time that times in our lives when our bodies are changing a lot so whether that's puberty pregnancy menopause you know getting older these are all risk factors for mental health issues and and you know lots of issues in our lives and and it's probably no surprise because if your uh sense of who you are and how you're doing in the world is based on these sort of signals some of which we can become aware of some of which are sort of background signals we don't know you know we don't consciously you feel but they affect us anyway if that changes so you're you know a woman 40s and 50s who you know for better or worse you've got used to the kind of weird crazy cycle of hormones that makes you you know crazy one week and happy the next week and then all of a sudden that's gone and everything's changing and you don't know what to believe anymore so it's no surprise that these kind of big physical shifts have these big mental shifts as well and shifts in well-being because you don't know you don't know where you are anymore it takes a while to kind of get yourself back but you also write about the the surrounding world because there's evidence so there's there's a research called Manos Sakiris who's in London who looks into the politics of feeling and so he's done a lot a lot of research into interoception and he makes the argument that one of the reasons that people are so stressed now he looks at sort of the at the American election cycles and things is because the way that sort of the political climate is moving, no matter what side you are and what you believe, sort of rational debate has sort of given way to mudslinging and sort of appealing to emotions.

15:15And so everyone's angry and everyone's screaming at each other. And so people are being dragged around by their feelings. But if you're not tuned into what you're feeling and why, then you have no way of sort of navigating that without just feeling I am anxious and I'm angry and I'm scared and so he makes the argument that we need to help people get better at sort of being curious so I'm angry what am I angry about you know instead of me looking at a political story okay maybe look at it from a completely different standpoint look at two opposite ends of the political scale how that's being reported does one make me feel angry and one make me feel sad what's going on there you know what do I and sort of to to be curious about what we're feeling and why but if you just allow yourself to be dragged around by the heartstrings all the time then it's so hard to know which way is up in this day and age I think yeah I mean the science interoception I think is one of those areas where it's quite rare actually in science so it's a genuinely new perspective on the mind and on neuroscience and on health and treating difficult conditions like pain and fatigue and depression all these conditions that don't have easy answers but it's also something that's really really relevant to our daily lives and it's also something that it's quite easy to apply if you know about it if you know it's there then you can make a bit of an effort oh you know what I think I will just just take a bit of time to see how I'm feeling and be curious about that and and take rest when I need it and see how that works for me so yeah I think it's really really is one of those times in science where it really is important people tell you all the time that there's been breakthroughs left right and center But this really does feel like something important for how we live our lives and for our health and well-being.

16:56A couple of years ago, I started therapy with a somatic experience therapist. And from there, I started studying, and Megan did a similar path. I started studying nervous system regulation and stumbled upon this idea of co-regulation. and apropos to what you're talking about with the political realm, I realize that other people's emotions can have an impact on my nervous system and put me in a dysregulated state. And conversely, I can have an impact on other people if I stay regulated. And the key seems to be to be aware of that when it's happening. And I think there's this Buddhist saying, for those of you listening, no, I've not become a Buddhist, but amazing sayings.

17:43And this one is don't take the hook. You know, so that like when you're listening to people screaming at each other about some political issue, it's a choice to enter into that and become dysregulated. And that's why for me, man, I just have to take a breath and slow everything way down and settle my body. Yes. I think that's really important to do. And so there's been some research into fake news and why people believe fake news. It's tempting to think, oh, well, they're just stupid if they don't really think about it. But actually what they found was when people were given examples of fake news, when they were given a little time to reflect on what they read and thought, does that ring true or does that seem a little bit far-fetched?

18:26It didn't matter whether it aligned with their political beliefs or not. Once they had time to reflect, they could spot fake from real. So it is really taking a little bit of a breath and going hmm and the other thing I think is really important and I talk about this a lot with regards to sort of wellness culture and there's so much pseudoscience out there people trying to sell you this magic cure to x y and z so well just take a beat and think who's telling me this why do they want me to believe them what's in it for them and also what's in it for me you know and if the answer is well they get richer they got more powerful and it makes no difference to my life apart from I get angry, then as you say, don't take the hook.

19:05You have to sort of protect yourself and you have to be careful with that nowadays when it's literally coming at us from all sides.

19:18Carolyn, I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about movement. Again, you know, our audience and we as well are people who basically sit around and are paid for thinking through things. You know what I mean? Like we're mostly knowledge workers in some way. We mostly sit at our computers throughout the day. Maybe we're sitting in meetings, but we're definitely sitting a lot. And we all kind of know intuitively that's not a good thing. We're doing that too much. But talk a little bit about how our brains are actually evolved for movement, not thinking like this is this existence is not what we're designed for, shall we say?

20:02Yeah. So I think it's tempting to think, oh, we have these big, clever brains because we need to think big, clever thoughts. But actually, that's not really how we ended up this way. So you think, you know, our bodies and brains haven't really changed much since we were hunter gatherers. And so that's what we're sort of mostly sort of honed for. And you think about the job of being a hunter-gatherer it's not you know work for dummies you know you can't just wander around and hope that an antelope just falls over dead in front of you and carry it home you know you have to think um you have to work as a team you have to have a plan you have to outsmart your prey and then you have to remember the way home and if you're a foraging side of the team then you need to remember where the best food is and then also how to get home and how to store it so so hunter-gathering is skilled work and some anthropologists uh david reiklin he's called he's who's looked into why his idea is about why it is that as well as being use it or lose it for the body so if we don't use our bodies they go sort of flabbing with muscle and capacity the same can be said of the brain and he explains it by saying well we evolved to be cognitively engaged endurance athletes so we're designed to be up on our feet and moving and thinking but thinking as well as you know physical strength takes a lot of energy and a lot of upkeep so if you're not doing the moving bit then you lose some of you lose some of your physical tone and prowess but you also your brain stops investing quite so much in making new connections and servicing the ones that are already there and keeping the blood supply good so we do need this movement to get the best out of our whole system body and brain all working together to be up on our feet and thinking and moving that's the ideal I do get you know because my job's as a writer and a reader of scientific studies that a lot of the time I spend sitting as well but one interesting thing from studies of the few modern hunter-gatherers that there still are in the world like the Hadza population in Tanzania they spend about as much time resting as westerners do but they do it in different ways they don't have chairs so when they stop they either kneel down um they squat they're constantly sort of getting up and down from the floor which means that you're constantly using your core muscles you're using your leg muscles so they're sitting actively whereas we just flop so i mean it's sort of easier if you work at home or you don't you know have judgmental colleagues in the office but one way to sort of get the benefits while still sitting is to move around a lot so sit on the floor I've got a little desk that I take and sit on the floor and fidget get up and move change of scenery and in that way you can kind of engineer a little bit of that into your into your working life but yeah it's tricky our life today well known that they don't really match up with what we were designed for so we have to then seek out the movement that we don't get in our everyday lives well it's hard because you can pretty much sit and engage in a virtual world nine, 10, 12 hours a day and never get up except to relieve yourself or get something to eat.

23:12And then even then it's kind of like, you know, interruption to this virtual world. And, you know, what I'm looking for these days is practices. Like I work out with a strength trainer three times a week, but he's been really on me to get walking. And it's been a little bit difficult because the weather's not been cooperative. At least that's the story I'm telling myself.

23:37But like even practical things, I wonder your thoughts on even things like, you know, a treadmill under your desk. Yeah, I've been asked that a lot since writing move. And my kind of answer is, I don't think that being chained to your desk in a slightly different way is necessarily the answer. I mean, it's better than not. But I think what the research seems to show when we're looking at long-term brain health and sort of cognitive decline in aging and all this sort of stuff the relationship between moving and brain health isn't about how much time you spend exercising it's about how much time you spend sedentary so it's about breaking up the sedentary time so it's great I'm not saying you know don't do an eight-hour day and then go to the gym or go at lunchtime that's fantastic but more important is to break up the sitting so one of these things that seem to be gathering momentum a little bit is the idea of movement snacks so throughout the day so it's like the equivalent of food snacks you can quite easily snack all day long without really noticing and the calories add up right it's the same with exercise with movement so you can do you know if you think oh i need to empty the dishwasher you can go down you can squat to pick it up and squat down or whatever you can do little bits like that throughout the day and they add up in ways that are good for your health good for your well-being can keep your strength better than it would otherwise be.

25:00So the gym is great and exercising is great. But this idea that we've got where, you know, exercise is what we do when we're not sitting down is one extreme or the other. The ideal would be to get more movement throughout our lives and actually to maybe get it into the working day. So it's taken me a long time to realise that as a writer, the time when I start to break through the bit that I don't understand in this scientific theory or bit I don't know how to write, it's when I down tools and go stuff this and go for a walk. And it always comes to me on a walk. It's taken me a long time to think, OK, that's not skiving, that's work.

25:33And there's been studies done of people who have been sent out for a 20-minute walk around a university campus, and they come back and they do standardised tests of creative thinking. And they are much more creative after a quick walk than a comparison group who just sat quietly in the room next door. and the benefits of taking a quick walk over spills for well at least 20 minutes that's how long they they measured after the walk afterwards so if you want to do good work it's it's benefits you to go out and do the walk and come back you get you get all these extra benefits when you get back but it's kind of past you get partly getting past the mindset of oh well I haven't got time to do that no I haven't got time I've got too much to do to go for a walk well actually you might get more done if you do.

26:18The other thing that I've found to be really helpful, and it's funny, I 1000 % agree on the walk. Oftentimes I'll go out for a walk and I'll go calling my dad about something business related that I've just had some big breakthrough, like five minutes into the walk, you know, and I'm going to hold out for that and just have so many ideas. But one of the things that I have found tremendously helpful within the workday is to look at my calendar and I do this best when the weather's nice, but just say what on this calendar today could be a phone call that I could take while walking. We live in a very, we live and work in a very walkable area.

26:54And I know that's not true for everybody, but even if you just have a parking lot behind your office building or your driveway, you can do this. I think COVID, we think every meeting has to be zoom, you know, and actually the phone still works, you know, in some ways the phone is better. And I have found that if I can just squeeze one or two meetings, whether it's 15 minutes or 30 minutes in and walk around the block while I'm talking, that day is exponentially better than the same day spent fully on Zoom. Like there's just no content. Yeah, and it's funny during the lockdowns, you'd see people, because everyone was working at home, you'd see people walking around, the woods near my house were never fuller, usually just dog walkers, but then it was everyone was out there and they were all, yep, yep, yep.

27:40They were all getting there. and you think oh that's great people have discovered this and you know you'll see more of this but no it's all gone back to normal again and also the benefits of the walk as well as if you're having if you're having a whether it's a meeting with you know a colleague or a difficult conversation or whether it's with a child or a parent or you know other relationship when you're walking it's just easier to have tricky conversations because you're not looking at each other there's no confrontation not across the desk and so it's quite easy you know with teenagers go for a walk and just you know some stuff starts to blow out and you can connect better and one of the things I looked at in move was about synchronization and the way that we move when we walk together we sort of fall into step and there's reasons why every human population on the planet pretty much has some kind of synchronized movement or dance in their culture because it helps to bond us together so when you are moving next to me it sort of it confuses your sense of self because I know where my body is in space and I can see my body moving and feel my body moving if I see your body moving along with mine it sort of blurs that boundary between where my body ends and where your starts and there's these amazing experiments from toddlers all the way up to sort of CEOs of corporations where if you get people to move in synchrony with each other and then get them to do games where they can either collaborate or stab each other in the back they're far more likely to collaborate if they've been walking in synchrony or moving in synchrony whether it's tapping or whatever, before they play that game.

29:12And it's something in us that we feel more bonded together. We care more about each other and we're kinder to each other if we've been moving in synchrony before. You know, I know that most people, including me, are motivated by loss aversion. So I want to talk about the stakes if we don't do some of these things. Over time, if I'm persistent in a sedentary lifestyle, what happens to my mental capacity, my mental agility, and just my overall mental health? Well, it's tricky because there's been a lot of changes over time, one of which is that we've become much more sedentary. But there are some, so if you want scary statistics, there's some statistics that say that 13 % of Alzheimer's cases can be traced to a sedentary lifestyle or affected by a sedentary lifestyle.

30:00So that's not to say that everyone who gets Alzheimer's has done something wrong and you know that you don't exercise you've got it coming and none of that because things do happen for lots of different reasons but one of the most easy one of the easiest parts of lifestyle to protect your brain health and your capacity long term is physical activity the others are social connections having a purpose having community you know all these things are really really important for keeping our brains healthy as we age so yeah that's kind of a scary statistic, I think, but it's one to use with caution because you don't want to be pointing the finger at people and saying, oh, well, well, if you just put off your butt a bit more, you would have been fine.

30:40But that's not the case. But it definitely is a modifiable factor and risk factor in cognitive decline and Alzheimer's. You know, what's great about those two things that you just said, the need for movement, but also the need for connection, you know, is those things actually do really well together. You know, you can invite somebody that you want to connect with, like you were saying a minute ago, the synchronicity idea, you know, could be a family member, or it could be someone you want to develop a friendship with or a relationship with. We've been lately talking a lot about the idea of different practices that you can use to have more human flourishing in your life.

31:21And one of, I think the distinctives of those are that you can accomplish a lot with relatively little time. You know, for example, you could be, I love to garden. So like I could be working in my garden. So I'm out in nature, I'm moving, but I could also do it with a friend or my husband could be out there or one of my kids could be out there with me. And now all of a sudden it has a relational component instead of having to do three separate things, you know, something for physical activity, something for connection, need to get outside. It's like, I'm actually doing all three at the same time.

31:52And so I think you get some kind of, this is very unscientific, but I think you get some kind multiplier when you do them simultaneously you know yeah I mean who's got the time to do these things separately and it's like you know oh I should also be mindful well yeah but you can be mindful whilst moving as well and you know so these things don't have to be done as like oh well now I must do this now I must do that um but yeah the people that that sort of live longer longest healthiest happiest lives usually have a lot of movement in their life sort of incidental to their life and good strong social connections as well as things like diet and exercise you know and a bit of genetic luck in there as well but yeah these things all feed into each other you know I just think of the example of my I do at the moment um a street dance class which I may not look like the average street dancer but it's really fun it's a group of a group of women the occasional man joins in and we're all you know we're different ages we're all very different people but we have bonded because week after week we try and do pirouettes and fall over and do these kind of moves and end up falling over and giggling and you know it's really brought us together as a group and now we really care about each other and we're devastated that we might have to do less because teachers moving away and you know so these just having these kind of things you do together can just bond you together with people you might not otherwise know and I think that kind of feels like something the world should know and we're also focused on what why we're so different I think if you realize we're actually very similar by moving together and spending time together, maybe that could help make the world a little bit of a better place.

33:25Everyone should do street dance. yes well i've noticed just your point there that you know when we only exist in a virtual world this is where there is so much division and conflict and that's where it all begins but we actually relate to people when you talk to people with whom you think you're miles apart in terms of values and all the rest but you actually have more in common than you think but you wouldn't know that if you spend all your life in the virtual world yes absolutely absolutely doing things together that really helps. I want to talk about the difference, because this intrigues me, between sleep, which I've tried to prioritize, and waking rest.

34:07What we know is that both are very important, obviously. So I've just been researching and writing about a phenomenon called deep rest, which people may have heard of. I think Andrew Huberman talks about it, but there's a group of scientists who are looking at it in a slightly different way to how Andrew Hupin talks. He talks about sort of relaxation and meditation but what this group of researchers is talking about, Alexandra Crosswell is the lead researcher, talking about putting the body into a restorative state so that's enhancing parasympathetic nerve activity which the easiest way to do that you don't need to buy anything to do that you need you can just breathe deeply and slowly six breaths per minute is a physiological sweet spot that seems to enhance vagus nerve activity and increase oxygen respiration, does lots of good things basically.

34:58And when we allow ourselves to get into this state, we take it from being this always on firefighting mode. It gives us a break to get everything back down to normal so that then we're rested and ready to go up because the way the stress response is supposed to work is it's supposed to be kind of full on and raise our heart rate raise our breathing rate gets tense and ready to move that's all useful as long as it goes back down again afterwards because that whole response costs a huge amount of energy in very real terms there's studies where they've looked at the metabolic rate of cells when they're exposed to stress hormones and their metabolic rate increases by 60 they burn through energy 60 faster so you can't keep that going and You know, the best way to restore is overnight at sleep.