Fathers Lose Testosterone When They Raise Their Kids | Aldrich Chan, Psy.D.

24:04And this comes from Nikhil Choudhury and his colleagues from Cambridge. And so, for example, social relationships and community is a major one. That's a big difference and mismatch. Another one includes child rearing practices, alloparenting. Another one is education. There's also egalitarianism, equality throughout. And then there's present orientation, which basically they're sort of immediate return versus what our society's very delayed return. We could get into those more in a bit. But I think some other ones that they don't note that I think that Nikhil separately, when I talked to him, agreed with me on, you know, movement, diet, and exposure to the natural world.

24:51Those are all extremely important areas as well that they're finding lots of more and more evidence for to support the mismatch.

24:59Gabrielle Lyon:It's concerning, isn't it? We both have kids and I just, I wonder how we're going to be able to form a life and behaviors for them because it's certainly tech is going to continue to increase. That was actually the second reason I didn't mention as to why I put this book together was the birth of my son. So that was a big part. What world am I bringing it into? And I became so much more conscientious and aware of society, we could say, and the comings and goings of technology and so forth. I want to come back to that. I want to come back to your thoughts on reality. but we still have to get to the D in discord.

25:45Yeah. So the final one, discord, that's now about the belief systems that lots of us are functioning on and that we're, I guess, lots of people are inculcated into really. I think a big one that I bring up time and time again is the separation of mind and body, right? This idea that somehow all of our virtues can be pinpointed to our soul or to our mind, but then everything bad about life is related to our biology in some way.

26:22Gabrielle Lyon:Explain more. Tell me more. Yeah. So, I mean, I've had, I could share, clinically speaking, I can share, you know, there are frequently, you know, well, clients will come in and they come in and they feel very conflicted, right? They have, for example, this, I don't know, let's say a compulsion towards some sort of, let's say a sexual desire, or let's say an aggressive thought or experience. And they'll attribute that to, oh, it's just, it's my body. It's just who I was, how I'm biologically wired. And then, you know, when it comes to all the person's values and, you know, aspirations, that's all attributed to, well, his soul, his mind, the true self, right?

27:03And this automatically, unfortunately, creates a never-ending war within oneself, this unending war between mind and body. And some people start treating their bodies with less care, and they should, even though everything we do is realized and expressed through our bodies. And we know now more than ever that the mind cannot be simply the brain. It's just insufficient to explain it all. We know the gut brain, for example, which has become very popularized, has more nerve endings moving up to the brain than the brain does to the gut. And changes in gut microbiota relate to changes in mood, cognition, and even personality.

27:45And when you look at different conditions, you can see different types of bacteria and so forth and colonies in different numbers, right? And then there's also information about cardiovascular challenges leading to executive dysfunction. And so it's all interconnected and we can't separate one from the other. It's best treating them both as one. I think that leads to a much healthier outcome.

28:10Gabrielle Lyon:You said something that I had been thinking a lot about. So I'm actually working on my third book. And part of this is about strong women. And I was thinking about the areas, the domains in their life that they really have to get right, these drivers, right? So we know that you need a strong musculoskeletal system, muscles, the organ of longevity. We know you need a strong brain, good metabolic health. And then I was thinking about the things that are inherent biological drivers, thirst, hunger, but love and attraction were also one of those drivers. It seems that it's clear it's not an emotion.

28:56Gabrielle Lyon:It's not sadness or anger. And why do I bring this up? Because you had mentioned, say, if someone comes to you and they feel aggressive or they're driven towards sexual desire or whatever it is, that is there this biological drive that, while it expresses in the body, that is normal and perhaps different in men versus women? So two things I wanted to say. So I'm going to answer the question. I did want to say, though, there are two competing models in emotion theory right now that's very, very popular. And the one I still am more close to comes from somebody named Yak Pengsep. And actually in his system of emotions, care is actually a primary emotional system.

29:46And so is lust and so is play, actually, which are very interesting systems that, well, we could just talk about later or whatever the case is. But just to mention that the care system, for example, would be most closely connected to this experience of love. So there is a system for that, and it is considered quite primary. Now, it is different, we could say, to some respect, in males and females. Just to the extent that the care system, at least from this evolutionary biological perspective, it's thought to have emerged for a mother's care for her child, basically.

30:29Gabrielle Lyon:That's exactly what I was reading, But that there is this desire that because of being able to raise a child that it seems as if it's not an easy thing, that there, you know, obviously there's attachment theory, but there's this biological drive that it seems, again, and this came from you talking about the, you know, are we separating the mind and the body too much? And, you know, again, I just am so curious as to how that plays out in our in the way that we think. So in the way that we think, are our thoughts coming through action, meaning if someone's desire to partner with someone. Right. So I have two kids.

31:11Gabrielle Lyon:Let's say I'm driven by love, not as an emotion, but as this biological necessity to be with my husband. And there's this ability to connect because we have to then subsequently raise children together. Am I less likely to have some kind of discord than, say, my husband or someone else? Not relating to, so for example, I might be very driven by one of those, again, biological needs versus, say, someone else. And if, again, this is maybe a little existential, but if I am less connected to my body, am I less likely to make those types of choices? Oh, I see. Okay. Well, yes. Yeah. You know, in fact, there are changes to the human brain and when you have a child.

32:08And it also happens to fathers to a certain extent. Of course, to the fathers who care about their kids, not to the ones who abandon them.

32:15Gabrielle Lyon:But it's interesting that one could even do that, definitely, as we begin to think about the human brain and mind and how that then presents as the entity of the human. Yeah, it's almost like what they called an innate releasing mechanism, as anthropologists would call it, where a specific condition would emerge in the environment and it automatically triggers this heightened connection with the people around us, a greater protection towards our children and family. And for fathers, you know, reductions in testosterone and other neurochemicals related to lust and so forth. So the discord, what I have here, as I understand it, is this mind-body dualism.

33:04Gabrielle Lyon:And I think that you've said this before, that the social media exploits and reinforces these systems over time. Historically speaking, one of the major splits, and I've mentioned the agricultural revolution a few times now at 10 ,000 BC, because that's when hunter-gatherers stopped hunting and gathering, we could say, or it diminished quite a bit. And so what happened in that situation was the urge for conservation emerged and was quite pleasantly satisfied by this potential for them not to move anymore in order to have food so they can grow their crops, they can farm. But what this led to is more sedentary living.

33:48It also led to greater population, which led to a greater spread of disease, which also led to malnutrition. And it led to all sorts of consequences that were unforeseeable, unanticipated. anticipated. And I think what's going on now is the same thing with the digital age, with technology and this age of misinformation, if anything, right? Like we're exposed to more tragedy in the world than we were ever evolved to experience, right? Just via the news and, you know, what we usually knew about, at least from a hunter-gatherer perspective, is what was going on in our tribe and maybe a neighboring tribe, you know, not necessarily what's happening all the way in Europe or in Asia and so forth.

34:32So, you know, the media, in attempting to, you know, get more views and get more attention, throw more polarizing ideas out there and polarizing information and tragic information. And so, yeah, that is going to sustain some of these perhaps negative belief systems about humanity and about maybe even oneself.

34:58Gabrielle Lyon:I was just talking to my husband because it was Friday night movie night at our house. And when you go through the previews, and people might think this is silly, but the news is really dark. But also the movies and all of the things that we're seeing, we're exposed to so much more in a way in which I don't think even consciously we're aware of and how that can be very insidious into what that means for how we feel about ourselves and others. And I know that a lot of this stuff is new language to our listeners, the default mode network and, you know, this idea of mental time travel and how our minds wander.

35:44Gabrielle Lyon:Do you think that this is at the root of what goes wrong? I think it's at the root of what a lot of what goes wrong. I wouldn't say it's an all-encompassing theory. I wouldn't be so bold to say that, but I do think it relates to a lot of the symptoms and that if we're capable of finding ourselves in harmony with natural principles, that life can be a lot easier and we can be more empowered. Just to throw it out there, to make it a little practical, because I love this Netflix idea that you brought up. So some people might wonder like, okay, well, how does any of this, how can we use any of this information to our benefit.

36:21And let me ask you, Gabrielle, when you guys are looking for a movie on Netflix, has it ever been a case where you spent way too much time scrolling and looking for a film to choose?

36:31Gabrielle Lyon:That's the joke in our house. So we spend the first half an hour of movie night trying to find something to watch. Right. So here's something kind of interesting. So for example, we evolved to have and hold only about four bits of information in our minds at a time. Now, historically, they'd say seven plus or minus two, but that's including the ability to rehearse that information and other variables. But really, it's really just about four. And so one of the things that's happening in that phenomenon that seems to occur to everyone is that we are overloaded. It's choice overload. There are too many choices that they present us.

37:09And so it takes forever. And so one of the things that you can do very easily in this situation is pre-select four to six movies, you know, movies that throughout the day, oh, this person recommended this movie, said this could be good. Oh, I saw this one had an interesting title. You know, just write down a list and then choose, you know, four to six of them. And then within the family, you can look at the previews of these and figure out which one you want to watch. It simplifies things a lot and you'll see it makes things a lot smoother.

37:36Gabrielle Lyon:I love that recommendation. Actually, that's what we started to do, believe it or not. Because we had to solve for it by, usually by Wednesday. Everyone has to submit what their choices are going to be because we're not going to do that. So by Friday, we have that. And that's probably the same for everything, whether it's dinner places, food choices, clothing, whatever it is. I would call that an action that is aligned with natural principles. What else can we think about in terms of natural principles, some of these other principles? Because that, again, that's foreign to me. I didn't realize that my brain can only have four bits, probably only three bits of information.

38:15Sticking with the mismatch theory, right? One of them is time orientation, which is present orientation. So in hunter-gatherer tribes, they tend to be, what I mentioned before, immediate return hunter-gatherers. And what that basically means is that their actions lead to pretty direct feedback. So if they go hunting, and let's say it was a failed hunt. Okay, they failed the hunt, they have to eat the food that they foraged. for us now we're functioning more so on this delayed we humans we suffer from something called temporal discounting meaning that we discount or reduce the value of events happening in the future and this is very quantifiable so whenever something is further on the future we're less motivated to actually well fulfill that obligation or responsibility so let's say somebody is trying to, well, in your profession, maybe someone's really trying to lose weight, right?

39:14Or they have diabetes and they're trying to reverse diabetes, or they're trying to do something in order to reach that goal. You may find that they have some issues with motivation or discipline, or it takes time to acquire that. And so part of the issue is that maybe if they're very obese or very, very unhealthy, the goal is way too far out and they just can't materialize it in the present. And so with that delayed return, instead what you would want to do is create immediate returns throughout the process. So basically immediate rewards and immediate ways or faster ways for them to get feedback that's very constant and very, you know, even daily or weekly.

40:00Gabrielle Lyon:So for example, if someone wants to lose weight, and this is something that we see in our clinic all the time, is that it's hard because it's projected to the future. Or if I study now or do this work now or save now, then I'll be better off later. And typically technology, that's what gamifying apps, they'll get an immediate feedback. I think that that's what maybe... That's actually one of the reasons why it's so addictive. I think that's a good use of technology. I'm not super against technology. I think we just have to be very cautious about how we move forward with it. I think that's a great way to use technology.

40:36Gabrielle Lyon:Are there other ways that we can collapse our future self to our present? The best thing you could do is try and creatively come up with a way to bring up the potential emotions that you might experience in that moment. So we want to improve intrinsic motivation and motivation coming from the inside versus extrinsic motivation. I'm going back to the networks. Actually, there's a difference in how your brain registers these two. Extrinsic motivation is actually a little more DMN related, more about the stories that we tell ourselves from the external world, whereas the intrinsic motivation is more visceral.

41:15It activates an area called the insula, which relates to another network called the salience network, which allows us to toggle back and forth between the DMN and the central executive network.

41:25Gabrielle Lyon:So how do we practice or improve the extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation? Because ultimately, we have to ask ourselves the quality of our lives, the quality of our lives related to our relationships, our environment. But all of these components are likely really important. So I think a big part is, again, bringing up the emotional experience of what it's like to complete it. But I think another good strategy is helping them identify what their core values are and linking them to their core values. So the way I like to identify values, and this actually goes back to my first book, Reassembling Models of Reality, is through what I call vital signals.

42:11And basically, these are psychophysiological responses in relationship to what's categorized as self-transcendent experiences. So when you're watching a movie, sometimes we feel moved, right? I'll give you an example. There's a scene in the Dark Knight. One of my clients brought in, and he's in this prison, and it's this big, you know, big, big, what is it? It's like a cave, and he's stuck, and he has to climb his way out of there, right? But he keeps falling and falling over and over again because he keeps bringing baggage on and having that safety net until finally to bring the fear of death back into him.

42:52He takes the bag off and then he climbs it and makes it to the top. This was very moving to a particular client of mine. And so I, you know, as we're discussing this, I asked him what was it that was so moving about that scene? And he had some issues with addictions historically. And And so what moved him so drastically was not only the Dark Knight's resilience, but also his ability to let go of clinging on to what was old or what was safe. And that was what was necessary for him to move forward. And so that's an example of identifying that value and then linking it to, well, what are the concrete sort of exercises or activities that he wanted to engage in?

43:42that would help him get out of that hole that he was in.

43:46Gabrielle Lyon:When you work to identify values, do you think that it's where someone is spending their time? Meaning if someone values family or connection or honesty, there's all these different things. Would you say that the evidence of what someone values is how they are spending their time? or is it more repetitive behavior? So I think lots of people think they value things that they don't actually value. That's one thing also that I think is important to think about. So like, for example, somebody who's very health conscious and believes they need to be healthy and that's important to them. And then there's smoking cigarettes, let's say.

44:34You know, at that point, the question is, well, is it truly something that you value or is there something more dominant within you that you're not conscious of? So that's also a big part of sort of discovering what is it that they, if there is a dominant belief that's sort of consuming them and keeping them from their value. So is time spent necessarily a reflection of their value? It can be if there's no dissonance involved in that time spent. But if there is dissonance, I would ask the person to consider what's going on. Is there a conflict in their system of values? And is there something else to be uncovered?

45:12Gabrielle Lyon:And do you find that when you work with clients over time that they have to course correct what they really value and then how they're executing on that? Yeah, yeah. A big part of it is also the fact that people change. We all change with time. And so sometimes values change as well. And we also have different values for our work life versus our social life versus our intimate life and so on and so forth. And so it's important for them to be aware of what many of those core values might be. And this is probably different for everybody, but do you think that there are some things that are always going to be there?

45:52Gabrielle Lyon:And then other things, for example, Maybe someone values time with their friends and then they are in their 40s and then they have a child and maybe they don't value time with their friends anymore. But do you think there are a core set of values that people always have? Again, how many – I mean, you've probably seen thousands of patients, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yes, I do believe there are. And actually this moves into the territory of moral intuitionism. Oh, yeah. I wanted to talk about this. So we were starting, to be fair for people, we started the conversation off camera and you have studied Taoism.

46:33Yeah, yeah, it's a contemplative practice. Which is to be like water.

46:38Gabrielle Lyon:And obviously I'm butchering this. You're going to tell me how that's different. But right now everyone's talking about stoicism. And stoicism is really this idea of logic, how probably to not be like water, more like an immovable stone statue. And there are two, I would say, competing philosophies, but you had said to me, hey, but actually there are similar crossovers. And this is how we somehow got on the conversation of moral intuition. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so I'll repeat what I said in some brevity, but there's lots of commonalities. they're both philosophies based on nature. The core difference between the two is how much Taoism favors intuition over reasoning.

47:23And to that extent, part of the research that I did was looking into whether there is proof that intuition can outcompete analysis or logic in some way. And the other portion to it is, as I just mentioned, are there intuitions that we're born with that may relate to our moral compass, you could say. And both of those, I think, are quite fascinating. So the first one is, what is intuition? That's a big question. Lots of people think that intuition is BS, that it's not really good for anything. But the truth is that the science seems to contradict this. And there are many theories as to what intuition might be.

48:07We don't fully understand it. So I think it is a nonlinear, rapid, complex process that synthesizes information from multiple domains in the brain, leading to a somatic experience of sorts. So there is Antonio Damasio, a famous neuroscientist, and I believe his wife was involved as well, came up with the somatic marker hypothesis. And it's basically they would put people to play this neuropsychological game. It's called the Iowa gambling task. And they wanted to see how people made decisions under uncertain situations. And what they ended up finding is that, and there's a way to win in this gambling test, but people weren't able to logically figure it out.

48:55And what they found was that an area of the brain called the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, which is part of the DMN by the way, becomes highly active when people make a decision in these uncertain situations. So let's look at real life. Have you ever been in a situation where there was nothing inherently dangerous about the place you're in, but you felt that there was something off your body told you that there's something wrong with this place or something off with this person or whatever the case is. And so you left or you did something to escape the situation. And I think most people would say, yes, it's happened.

49:33So the question is, how does that happen? And so this is the idea. And so the VMPFC, the ventral medial prefrontal cortex is a convergence zone where multiple regions of the brain are feeding it information. Another sort of expression of intuition are aha moments. And one area of the brain that comes very lit up is the right superior temporal gyrus. But basically what's happening there, like the person wasn't thinking about whatever problem they're trying to solve. In fact, they're probably doing something completely different. And then suddenly, aha, something snapped into place. Intelligence doesn't need to be conscious.

50:10It doesn't need to be metacognitive, think to think about thinking. Intelligence can be very spontaneous. Think about people with photographic memories or people on the spectrum who can tell you what happened on June 1st, 1922 on this newspaper, right? Like tell you an exact line. Like when you ask them, how did you do that? You're like, I have no idea. That's intelligence though, right? And so this is where intuition is really coming into play. And so now we look at studies that we're looking at, well, let's compare intuition analysis and see where does one outcompete the other. And so I'll tell you the gist of it.

50:47And if people want more information, again, they could find it in the book. I have all sorts of charts and tables. But basically, if a problem is simple and you know all the variables, analysis will beat intuition. If the problem is complex, but you still know all the variables, analysis will beat intuition. If the problem is uncertain, simple, or complex, but the variables, again, are just unknown, intuition will outcompete analysis. And I think for many of us, our lives, most of the time, all the variables aren't necessarily known. So that gives a very big place, an important place for intuition to stand by.

51:31Could someone get or train their intuition? That's a good question. So it depends. I think it depends on what the intuition is being used for, quote unquote, because another way to think of intuition, and I didn't define it this way, but you can look at it. Some people look at it as a predictive system that we learn from the environment, right? So I play guitar, right? So I love playing guitar. And when I was learning guitar is very difficult to play a lot of classical music. But as time went on, things got a lot easier, right? And so information, as you're first learning it, it starts off difficult.

52:14And then it gets moves over. Activation in the brain moves over shifts from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere when you start to get more procedural about it. And some people would say that this procedural memory can also be a part of intuition. So this is where the definition gets a little blurred. But if that's the situation, then yes, you can train, quote unquote, your intuition to do more things. But it always starts off messy before it moves into smooth territory.

52:44Gabrielle Lyon:I like what you said, though. It takes some of the mysticism away from intuition if we think about it as this idea and capacity to process complex information that might be outside of our conscious awareness. Which makes me also think that we process more information than we even realize. And whether it is... Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That sounds like something you've read about. Well, I mean, I don't think people understand how amazing our brains are, right? Like, just briefly to throw it out there, right? So 100 billion neurons, each neuron has about 10 ,000 connections. That leads to about 1 ,000 trillion connections throughout the brain, which means that the amount of brain patterns that exist outnumber the amount of atoms in the universe.

53:40Gabrielle Lyon:How do we even relate to each other? That's a good question, and it's a big mystery. It's through a lot of filtration. So we use about 20 % of the energy that our body produces, right? But what that amounts to in electricity is 20 watts of continual use of electricity that makes our brain function. 20 watts, that's enough to light up a little 20-watt light bulb. Now, people in, I think it was Project Blue Brain or the Blue Brain Project, they tried to quantify how much electricity it would take to power a supercomputer that would mimic what our brains can do or minds can do. and they came up with about 10 gigawatts, which is like enough to power millions of houses.

54:28I think it's like 10 to 15 million average American houses. And so there's so much mystery still left to the brain and it's so energy efficient and fascinating. And all the time, you know, every single moment that's passing by right now, we are creating this beautiful, high def, at least to us, it seems high definition world, right? That a computer could not do. unless it spent X amount of power and complexity. And so there's just so much mystery still left to it, which is actually, if you want to talk a bit about reality, it's one of the reasons why Hoffman, Donald Hoffman, would suggest that we don't see reality at all, that everything is just filtered to the extent that it's literally 0 % of reality is seen.

55:18because it would simply take way too much time to render all of reality with 100 % accuracy. We see what suits our survival.

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56:59Gabrielle Lyon:Don't miss it. You know, I had mentioned that when I was at WashU, Marcus Reichel was there and he said something similar. I mean, again, it was neuroscience speak, so it was a little, it was totally over my head. And he was talking about the default mode network and that most of the time that, you know, our mind is wandering. It's not this we think that we're thinking all the time, but it's kind of running underneath. Right. Yeah. Outside of our conscious awareness. And I know in one of his papers, he says that he estimates that 60 to 80 percent of the information that's ongoing in our brains is actually completely unrelated.

57:43to perceiving the world around us, which leads to the question, what are our brains actually doing? And so there are all sorts of predictive circuits in our brains, and our brain, we co-create reality.

57:55Gabrielle Lyon:You know, there's this esoteric way about thinking that, you know, you, and I don't know if people would consider it esoteric, but more on the lines of, and you'll have to correct my language, more self-help. But if you look at the neuroscience, they're not separate. I know we call it social science or these ways of self-help and thinking positive. But from a scientific standpoint, there seems to be evidence behind some of these more self-help processes. Information isn't just coming in and our brains are just passively receiving that information. and then creating the world around us. Instead, information is coming in, but our brains are actively manipulating that information at very, very early levels.

58:48And Anil Seth and his colleagues have found that they're even interacting, for example, at the primary visual cortex. So even before information comes in, before it's visually becoming interpreted by our brains in V1, the very first layer, it's already being influenced by expectation and prediction-based systems in the brain. And so what we see is being completely changed into, again, what suits our survival most. And I think a nice metaphor for this is this sort of computer analogy where, you know, you're looking at a computer screen and this is Hoffman's idea. You're looking at a computer screen and everything's user friendly.

59:26You have these folders, you can open these folders, you can open up important documents, but at the end of the day, that's not the reality of the situation. Behind it's all this ones and zeros encoding and electrical circuitry that's completely different from what you're seeing, right? So it's a user-friendly interface in sort of his words.

59:42Gabrielle Lyon:So the idea that you can co-create your reality is, I mean... That's what I mean by that. So we don't have the ability, for example, like I see you and I visualize you in this particular way. I can't change the way I suddenly see you. What I could change would maybe be like instead of focusing on details, I could expand and focus on the whole or, you know, think about you as a person and integrate those sorts of qualities. And that's definitely things we can do. We could change how we view things, but not necessarily what we see. How we view things. Okay. That would make sense. Not what we see.

1:00:18Gabrielle Lyon:You know, I think about my daughter and when you have a child, you, at least for me, you can't help but reflect on your own growing up. And when I think about her experience of the world and then she might be very upset or she thought someone was mean when we were all sitting there and no one else had that experience. This idea of co-creating, it seems like you've got to get that hardware right. from the beginning. We're processing all of these things and it seems as if the time in which we lay the foundation of how we think, we have very little agency over our own lives because we're young. And so this lays down the foundation of how we process information, whether we believe in ourselves or we don't.

1:01:02Gabrielle Lyon:And then as you get, say, midlife, then you can reflect back and then you go, oh, okay, now I need to change this baseline computing. It just seems backwards. Right. Yeah. Interestingly enough, the networks for self-reflection that would allow us to sort of change the way that we think or think about what we're thinking, even, it kind of also goes back to the DMN. and the DMN tends to stabilize around 9 to 12 years old. And that's when it starts to really, where you can probably talk to them more about or harness the capacity for self-reflection to alter some of the narratives that may be going through their minds.

1:01:44Before that time, developmentally speaking, it tends to be a little more unstable of a network. And do you think that it's nature or nurture? It's always a mix of the two. Yeah, I would never say it's one or the other.

1:01:59Gabrielle Lyon:I'm saying primarily here is that, so I have two kids, they're both raised the same, and they experience things totally different. And I just watch them process it. And, you know, there's probably some genetic way in which they interpret their relationship or, for example, being vulnerable to sadness. Maybe one, I mean, I think that there are certain genes that maybe would highlight that someone would be more vulnerable to something like sadness versus someone else. Yeah, I mean, there are definitely genetic predispositions for everyone. And, you know, where things get really challenging to fully grasp is the epigenetic component.

1:02:43But as you said, it's about only 35 % of our brains are developed at birth. And so a huge percentage of our brain remains to develop as we get older. And that development is happening, of course, in direct relationship with the experiences that they have. And these experiences, yeah, they're molding the foundations of neural networks, but it's also potentially impacting things at an epigenetic level depending on the intensity, frequency, duration, and so forth of the experiences.

1:03:18Gabrielle Lyon:There is something that people say that if people experience trauma, right, there is this kind of intergenerational transmission. Is that validated? Yeah, there are more and more studies coming out supporting that there are epigenetic changes. So the genotype will remain the same. Remember, it's the phenotype, the expression of the genes that can be altered in some way. What about the positive aspects? You don't hear people talking about how they've developed these positive traits, and they've done these things, and then they transmit that. Yeah, I mean, that's what I mean by the deficit model.

1:03:56world of research is so focused on that, that there's not enough that's focused on the more resilient aspects. But if the negative side is true, I think it's valid to suppose that the other side can also be true as well, that there are epigenetic transmissions that may be more positive in nature, that some people who, I don't know, survived a famine or survived the Holocaust or something may not come out more vulnerable, but their children may come out more resilient in some way, or maybe they only become more resilient when those epigenetic markers are triggered in relationship to a particular experience, because not everything that's transferred through the generations is activated.

1:04:37It requires that condition in life for it to become, well, triggered and alive, right? So that's what I could say to that.

1:04:45Gabrielle Lyon:The seven principles of nature, the return path, you have a remedy and it's CPR West. And this remedy stands for creativity, process, relationship, wholeness, equilibrium, spontaneity, and transformation. You frame each principle as an invitation to a way of being, it was interesting, the Taoism is the way. When I was watching Yoda, baby Yoda saying the way, and it was really funny. I heard my daughter say, well, mom, but this is the way. And I wish I had remembered exactly what they were saying about it. But can you walk me through that? Yeah, of course. Of course. So to me, all of these principles are natural principles.

1:05:37For example, we could start with the first one with creativity. And there's much to say about many of these. So just let me know when you want to transition to the next one. But creativity. Nature is creative. we are always and we can think about creativity in the productivity sense but I'm actually not even talking about it in that particular way it's more so about the fact that we are in in perpetuity creating and being created and what's kind of existential and fun to think about is that we're at the edge of creation at all times and what's in front of the edge of creation is just nothingness and it's just you know it's just really interesting to think about that When you say nothingness, what do you mean?

1:06:46all of Taoist thought and thinking. And I think a lot of that applies well to what it means to be in harmony with the principle of creativity. Because if we accept, but I think it's fairly easy to accept that we are continually being created, we are a process of becoming, right? That change becomes the action of creativity. But lots of people unfortunately cling to their old identities, or they cling to a particular emotion, or they cling on to resentments and they are unable to let go. And while in those scenarios, what would be more natural would be being capable of adapting more fluidly with a particular situation, integrating and accepting it.

1:07:35And so I think that one of the biggest fears that I tend to see in my clinic quite a bit is the fear of uncertainty. It's something that plagues lots of people. Here's where science and Taoism can work together so well. In uncertainty, in research on uncertainty, there are two types of uncertainty. There's first order uncertainty and second order uncertainty. And the first order uncertainty, the variables are known. You know what the probabilities are.

1:08:02Gabrielle Lyon:Is that what, can you explain to me what the first order means? Yeah. So the first order, first order uncertainty specifically is just when we're confronted with an uncertain situation, we don't know what's going to happen, but you know that there are only, let's say, three different things that could happen in this situation, right? And if you know those situations, with a very high degree of probability, they classify that as first order. And in that situation, forging for more information or, you know, using whatever analytical tools that you would like to use can be beneficial for that situation.

1:08:39Second order uncertainty, now we're confronted with an uncertain situation, but we really don't know what the variables are, what the probabilities of those variables are. Let's say it's, I don't know, a medical treatment that's novel that someone hasn't taken before. And it worked on a small percentage of people, but it may be the last thing that you can try, right? That would be an example of second order uncertainty. And so second-order uncertainty can be very well, not confronted, but a Taoist approach can be very useful to working with that. And the Taoist approach, the way that I talked about it, is by using a discovery-oriented approach.

1:09:21So typically what would happen in that situation for lots of people? Threat detection, right? Frontal lobes are active. They're looking for threats. What if this happens? What if that happens? What if this happens? Their amygdala, their fight-flight system is highly active as well, and the person is scared and they're anxious and they're freaking out, right? Okay, that's one perspective. So some people will just burn out looking for solutions. And at the end of the day, something else happens and all that effort was for nothing. The discovery-oriented approach is inhabiting a state of uncertainty intentionally, inhabiting a state of unknowing.

1:10:02And this state of unknowing is, well, thinking about uncertainty differently. Number one, what does uncertainty bring to us? It makes you more alert. It makes you more open. It makes you consider what the possibilities are. It can lead to more creative responses. And without uncertainty, there's no adventure. Right. So that's one way. So instead of the deficit model of uncertainty, how about thinking about uncertainty positively?

1:10:29Gabrielle Lyon:So would an example be like if there's a business owner and the business owner is trying to scale, for example, and they are looking to hire new people, but they have an old team and they know that they have to evolve. Yeah, that's a great example. It's if they were paralyzed by this idea of all the things that could happen versus, okay, how can we explore this? It's going to work out. Regardless of how it works out, there's going to be opportunities for growth. And would that be a non-deficit model? So it's almost like as if someone is looking at it positively. Yeah. So it's looking at it positively, like recasting what is uncertainty and then approaching it from a curious standpoint.

1:11:17So instead of trying to solve it, instead of trying to find a solution, some things simply don't have a solution. You need to live through it. And to live through it, you can live through it anxiously or curiously, like a scientist would as they're trying to examine different variables or understand information. So what can I learn from what's happening from moment to moment?

1:11:37Gabrielle Lyon:That's good advice, because the time is going to pass. Right. Regardless. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And there's a great parable that comes from the Huaynanzi, which is also this old classical Taoist manual for an emperor. And actually I compare that to Marcus Aurelius, a Stoic, except the Huaynanzi was composed of many voices. But may I share the story? It's brief, and this is a popular one actually, so you may have heard it before, but I think it couches uncertainty quite well in these situations. So there was a family of Chinese diviners, and they were famous for their divining abilities. And one day, the father diviner, he had a horse and it was a beautiful horse and the horse ran away.

1:12:22When the horse ran away, the villagers came over and expressed their sympathies. But the diviner looked at them and said, no, this will be very fortunate. This will be very fortunate. And so the villagers left scratching their heads. What's going on here? This guy is very strange. He's mad. And then what happens, let's say two weeks later, that horse comes back and brings with it a few other horses. So the villagers come by and they're like, wow, this is amazing. This is great news, right? And the diviner looks at them and says, no, this is going to be very unfortunate. This will be very unfortunate, right?

1:12:59And so they leave again, scratching their heads. And then what comes next? Well, the diviner's son is training one of the horses and gets thrown off the horse and breaks his leg. And so the villagers come by, express their sympathies. Oh my God, this is so, such bad news. The father says again, no, no, this will be very fortunate. This will be very fortunate. And then a month later, the army came by trying to recruit the son, but the son had a broken leg, so they didn't recruit him. And what they heard in the news later on was that nine out of 10 people died in that war that the son would have been recruited to.

1:13:33And so the villagers were expressing how excited they were and happy and how lucky they were. And they said, no, this will be unfortunate.

1:13:42Gabrielle Lyon:I have heard that story. Right. It's a really good story because we don't know. Yeah. So we don't, we really, we don't know. And when we don't know, again, it's, can we be happily not knowing? Can we be okay in this unknowing? And I think that's something that society sort of tells us in indirect ways that it's not good not to know. I'm always told, don't say I don't know when someone asks you a question. You know, come up with a different response. And it's unfortunate because it's a mode of being that has led to such stringent criteria for perfectionism that it can lead to all sorts of psychological problems, especially in children, in schools.

1:14:27Gabrielle Lyon:So the not knowing, that is part of, if I'm understanding, that it allows someone to be open to also creativity? Yeah. Yeah. When you don't know, you're open to exploration. You become a little more playful about things. You're open to silly ideas, and sometimes the silly ideas are great ideas. Sometimes the serious ideas suck. Process and equilibrium, principle two and five. And this is what I have here is that nature is dynamic and not static. Balance is allostasis, not homeostasis. Can you walk us through a little bit of the science there and what or how someone can think to maintain this? What you express as this dynamic equilibrium.

1:15:14Yeah, sure. Sure. Okay, so let's start with a simple definition of process. Process is a continuous, patterned flow of change that maintains and transforms the natural world and ourselves, right? So it's just this ongoing perpetual movement. The world is dynamic. It's not static. It's a verb. It's not a noun, right? And I think people forget that. What process is about, what it invites us is it invites us towards attunement. It invites us to attune to what's happening in the moment, right? But what's happening in the moment is not necessarily always going to be a good thing. You see, you can go on two edges here.

1:15:58You can be misaligned in two ways. With process, if you are misattuned, one way is you become way too abstract. You're just abstract. You're just always in the DMN or you're always in your mind in the central executive. you're always thinking about things and you're completely out of place with what's happening in experience on the opposite spectrum you have someone that is far too concrete and they're just glued to the present moment and they have no perspective and they have no plan they have nothing and and in those cases you know um some people like to say oh just i like to go with the flow you know and it's like it's almost like an excuse but it's a misrepresentation of what flow actually is, which we could talk about that in a bit, which relates to the process.

1:16:43So it's about being balanced. How can you be immersed in the moment, yet with discernment, yet with perspective? That's the sort of ideal. And so what is the science behind this? What did I speak about in this chapter? So one of them was, we talked about it actually, it's intuition. um uh the other one is um well it's actually engaging yourself in states of flow and which by the way is not easy to do no not at all i mean you sound like okay well um having a bad day we'll

1:17:15Gabrielle Lyon:get into flow i mean that is uh not easy no no it's not it's not it's not easy and um that's You know, in Daoism, they called it a state of Wu Wei, or Mo Wei in Cantonese. But basically, it's the Western version of it. And it's interesting what they find in these studies of flow, because we talked briefly about intuition, right, and it being helpful in these unpredictable situations, more helpful than analysis. Well, flow states are states where also we're not consciously necessarily, well, one could say we're extremely consciously engaged, but we're not thinking from a meta perspective in these flow states, right?

1:18:02And in fact, what's happening when they look at brain scans of people in flow states, so example, I'm forgetting the author's name, but basically they looked at jazz pianists. And they had these jazz pianists. They would first play scales that they knew, and then they would improv, right? And improvisation can often lead to flow states. And what they ended up finding was basically a shutting down of a lot of the cortical regions of the brain. and this high activation of the subcortical regions. Now, some areas in the cortex were still active, but very little compared to when the person, for example, was not in a flow state.

1:18:42And most of the time when people are in flow states, they are feeling like the world is this sort of spacelessness or timelessness or basketball players will say they're in the zone and they're performing at their best, right? And that is fascinating, right? Because, again, this is the opposite of analysis. The person isn't analyzing every shot they're doing when they're doing it. Or as a musician and when I've played live shows, if I'm playing a solo, if I think about the solo I'm playing, I'm screwed. I'll hit the wrong note. And it's actually happened once before. It was very embarrassing. But, you know, so it's a very, you know, important experience.

1:19:20And to me, that is flowing. A flow is attunement with process. That's the ideal state to aspire for, one could say.

1:19:29Gabrielle Lyon:And the process you'd mentioned, this idea of misalignment, does that go back to values? How does someone know if they are functioning in a well-alignment process? process. Yeah. So I think a big part of this, well, it could be, there's both the subjective and objective side, right? So the objective side is burnout. For example, if someone is working way too hard and you ask them, why are you still in this job that you hate? And they come up with this list of reasons. And clearly they're sort of living in la-la land in their own minds. And they have maybe some reasonable justifications, but the truth is that the gravity or the weight That it's of impact to their well-being is so clear to you, for example, that it's not worth it, that they should switch, but they won't do it, right?

1:20:20For maybe there are other fears involved, but that would be an example of someone who is far too much in their minds.

1:20:26Gabrielle Lyon:So something that is impeding or impairing someone to be able to make the next right move. Right, right. Anytime there's interference with their social life, their personal life, professional life, that's really the core indicator of whether misalignment is occurring or not. Relationship. I think that that's relationship is next. Yeah, yeah. We talked a little bit about this also, just when you asked about, when we talked about the tree and how we're connected to everything around us. You know, there's so many interesting studies with a relationship because I think, and the important thing for me here is that, at least in my mind, I think most people are well aware that we are more connected than we're not.

1:21:08The problem is that that is an intellectual experience and not an emotional or an experiential happening, right? We don't experience that truth. And so for me, what the classical Taoism does, it brings in the practices that can lead you to that more experiential, that as an experiential truth. but in the chapter I look at the different ways. How are we actually really connected from the neuropsych perspective? And there are many interesting, fascinating studies. Obviously there's attachment, which we sort of touched on a little bit. And again, the idea of your brain being barely developed when you're born and everything is happening in relationship to others, it already serves as a core foundation to it.

1:21:50We also have mirror neurons, right? Neurons that fire with the mere observation of another person performing a task. V.S. Ramachandra did some fascinating studies that sound esoteric or sound woo-woo, but are completely not. For example, imagine you are watching somebody touch my arm, right? My arm's being touched. And right now you're watching me and there's nothing going on, right? You actually have neurons firing, but there's a signal telling your brain that it's not your arm being touched. But if we anesthetize that arm, what's going to happen is that as you're watching my arm being touched, you can literally feel your arm being touched.

1:22:25And so we really are just separated by skin. And she kind of joked, we call them the Gandhi neurons or empathy neurons, right? But we're all very connected. There are these hyper scanning studies looking at brain imaging of two brains at the same time when they're interacting with each other. Lots of EEG studies on that also finding that when people are engaged in a deep, meaningful conversation, their brains really do synchronize. And here's something I do think is very important. It's this idea of the selfish gene. Well, it's been propagated, this idea by Hawkins. And part of this is that it's an incomplete picture.

1:23:02And here comes the work of David Sloan Wilson, who talks about multi-level selection. Basically, the idea here is that virtuous traits can be selected for over selfish traits. By who? By people? Yeah. So in groups, actually. So the selfless gene is really focused at an individual level. But as we move up the levels into groups and tribes, into greater groups and societies, David Sloan Wilson's work focused on finding that it is true that there are some acts that are selfless that have no benefit to a person in a particular situation, but it will be selected for and passed down.

1:23:40Gabrielle Lyon:When you say selected for and passed down, do you mean that It's a specific gene. Yeah, through natural selection. Isn't that amazing? Yeah, and it changes the story because, again, people are fed this idea that we're just like humans are terrible in so many ways, but I think we're such mysterious, fascinating creatures. Yeah, I love this idea that there's a virtuous gene or probably money. Yeah, there are many that are very pro-social in different ways. And so I just wanted to add in the moral intuitionism part, because, again, lots of people think that morality is a social construction, but it's not, not entirely.

1:24:25It's only, again, part of the picture. What do you mean? So when we look at morality, if we think about fairness, if we think about justice, if we think about ideas of goodness and virtue, right? Again, lots of people think that we're just taught that as we get older. but actually they've done lots of experiments now. I know Somerville and her colleagues have done some and there are many others. I'm looking at babies between six-month-old babies, three-month-old babies. And when you look at babies, you will find overall that there are lots of little behaviors that they'll do that indicates that they, for example, let me just give you an example.

1:25:06Like they'll show a six month old different stuffed toys. And one of them is basically a helper. And the other one is trying to like solve a situation, a problem. And then you have one that like interferes with it. And they show this little game or this little story to little infants that are pre-verbal. And then afterwards they show them the different stuffed toys. And which one do they almost always end up choosing? It's the one that was helping. and they almost always did not choose the one that was interfering. Or when you show them videos of two kids and one kid gets more food versus another kid who doesn't get as much food, they'll be staring much longer time at the situation where there's an unequal distribution of food.

1:25:51And these sort of morality studies, they go all the way back to even rats and other animals that are so, so fascinating. The most fascinating one to me was a study with rats. So first of all, if you put a rat in an open space, they feel threatened, right? Because they get exposed and they're more likely to get killed. And so what these experimenters did was that they put a rat in a trap in the center of an open space. And then they put another rat, a free rat, in there to see if that free rat would actually help the trapped rat. okay um and the trapped rat is squealing and trying to get out right and what they find is that most of the time the rats will risk their lives quote unquote to save the trap rat then they did a second situation condition where they had uh they put another little uh area where there's chocolate chips so they said will this free rat ignore the trap rat and go open this and selfishly eat the chips on their own and leave the trap rat there and what they found again was that they end up freeing the trapped rat and both of them open the cage to eat the chips together.

1:27:00And that happened the majority of the times. And what's more is that it happened even more if the free rat was at one point a trapped rat, showing that empathy was learned in some way. And so there are many of these studies that really point towards the fact that humans have maybe better than were expressed in certain media outlets, we could say.

1:27:24Gabrielle Lyon:I mean, I love that. I love that. The relationship principle. Protein is having a major moment right now. It seems like it's being slapped on everything from water bottles to cereal. I don't know, the Kleenex boxes. But with all the hype, it can be tough to figure out if you're getting enough of the right kind of protein. Because, hey, it's not just about the quantity of protein you eat. It's also about the quality. And that's exactly why this episode is brought to you by David Protein Bar. Each gold David Bar packs an incredible 28 grams of protein for only 150 calories and zero sugar. That equates to about 75 % of calories from protein, which, by the way, completely blows away most protein bars that hover roughly around 40%.

1:28:22Gabrielle Lyon:And it's hands down one of the easiest ways to hit your daily macro goals. And best of all, they taste incredible. My dad loves them and he has zero filter when it comes to food, including my cooking. So if you want to upgrade your protein routine today, go to davidprotein.com slash Dr. Lion and subscribe to save 10 % on every order. And I will just add one more thing is I worked in psychiatry. I trained as a psychiatrist for two years before I went to other training. And one of the things that really struck me was this idea that two people in a relationship were one nervous system. They weren't two.

1:29:14Gabrielle Lyon:It just seemed wherever one person goes, the other person goes. And I think that we begin to see that just in general as nervous system connections. Yeah, yeah. My old mentor, Lou Cozzolino, he calls this the social synapse, like between the two synapses of neurons between us. And then this is sociostasis, how we use each other to regulate each other. and every interaction can lead to all sorts of either regulation or dysregulation, right? Yeah, that's a really powerful tool I, believe it or not, had not thought about is, for example, I have a really good girlfriend of mine. Her name's Alcita, and whenever we hang out, which I try to get her to hang out with me at least once a week, immediately I tell you my nervous system just downshifts, and I'm sure we all have downshifts, my stress.

1:30:08Gabrielle Lyon:But thinking about not just spending time with friends but spending time with people that you care about wisely I think makes a ton of sense. Right. Yeah. You have a wholeness and transformation or you're – again, we've got the equilibrium, spontaneity, transformation. So I suppose that we are now at – Wholeness. Yeah. wholeness is the idea that, well, the world presents as a unified, a singular unified experience of existence, right? It doesn't divide things. Our abstract minds divide things. As soon as we come up with a word for something, it creates a sort of, I imagine like a sort of fissure or crack in the wholeness of things.

1:30:58And so the importance of this is very, it's very important actually in the field of psychology. Because in psychology, you know, especially with clients that anyone works with, lots of times the issue is the inability to hold the good with the bad, right? And it's important to be able to do so. Because as Jung said a long time ago, humans weren't meant for perfection. That was meant for the gods. We're meant for wholeness. we're meant to be able to be human to be um to have both the good and the the bad qualities but to be aware of your negative qualities is going to be far better for you than to be unaware of them when you're unaware of those qualities they get projected onto the world onto other people and sometimes you act naively whereas when you're aware of them you can harness them in ways that can be beneficial to your life and so um wholeness is again it's about integration that's what it invites.

1:31:56It's about bringing the pieces together, understanding that our perspective is just one perspective. So one of the posts I think you liked actually, so I'll mention it, it came from, it's my idea of emotional truth versus emotional facts. And so lots of people who are in relationships, when they get into arguments, it's easy for one person to think that their version of the story is right and kind of even forget that the other person has a version of a story at all. It's more helpful for both people to, if you're in a relationship and it's a good one, to first don't give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that we're both coming in with incomplete narratives.

1:32:37And that's it, right? And so we come in with these incomplete narratives, and once the two have shared, then can it lead to, you know, something perhaps more productive or useful. Because sometimes you can be mad at something that doesn't exist at all. Every relationship is partially fictional and will always be. And that's part of the fun of being human.

1:32:57Gabrielle Lyon:This is what I'm hearing you say is this is prioritizing the relationship over the self, the protecting the relationship piece. Yes, exactly. We do not have transformation next. We have wholeness. We have equilibrium. Yeah. So equilibrium is an interesting one. That's the probably one that's the most deceptive one. Only deceptive to the extent that I don't mean, people think of equilibrium, they think of two things that are in stasis that are completely balanced out. So to me, again, not even just to me, but if we follow the rules that the world is a creative relational process, things are constantly moving, then there's some asymmetry that's involved.

1:33:37And this asymmetry points, at least to me, that I think might be interesting to the viewers, towards this idea of eustress. That the optimal balance for humans is not for us to stagnate, but it's tell us to be an optimal movement and motion. And so use stress is what we, is basically a reflex quote unquote good stress or positive stress. Most people think of stress in a negative way, but we do find that humans function optimally under some level of stress, mild to moderate levels of stress to be specific. Now, the next question people usually ask me is what is that, how do you know the difference between mild to moderate levels of stress and when you are not in those domains.

1:34:18And the answer to that is that it's quite psychological to the extent that if you believe that if you're feeling stressed, yes, that stress system will be active. Your sympathetic system will be active. You will have adrenaline, norepinephrine. You will have cortisol release, and that's natural for whether you're excited or sad or in states of eustress. So those feelings will be the same. The question becomes psychologically, do you feel like the stress that you're faced with is something you can actually confront successfully. And if you think you can prevail in the face of that hardship, you are still within the domain of mild to moderate stress.

1:34:54As soon as you think it's overwhelming or I don't have the resources to handle it, that's when we start moving to major stress. That said, some people miscalculate their abilities. And if they do have a quote-unquote interpreted major stress, if they reinterpret it or view it from a different perspective, it's possible for them to move that back into that mild to moderate levels of stress.

1:35:17Gabrielle Lyon:I agree with what you're saying. You know, how do you get people there? So I think a big part is with this wholeness principle, it goes back to that. They're all connected, by the way. It's not like one separate from the other, but it's about bringing in other perspectives, bringing out different frameworks for understanding things, and also for them to experience safety as they are confronting their vulnerabilities. Do you walk them through? So your clients or patients, do you walk them through or do you have tools that you put into place for them? Yeah. I mean, it's more about the process than the content.

1:35:55I would agree with you. A big part is you're sort of, again, you're trusting into, I'm trusting intuition a lot in practice these days. And yes, I read a whole ton and I write a whole lot, but at the end of the day when you're with someone, you have to tailor your treatment to who is presenting to you. And yeah, in those moments, it's the process of questioning, of empathy, of really trying to see yourself in their shoes and understand what they're coming from and what the context is.

1:36:22Gabrielle Lyon:There always seems to be a linchpin. I know for me, there's always a linchpin. So I work with a coach. His name is Jim Kachalka, and he will come in. It's like a razor blade. I'll be ruminating over something for, I don't know, it could be two days. And then it's one sentence and it just is, it just landed. And again, there's no, I don't know what that, there's no process for that. It's just, um, establishment of, of clarity amongst the, you know, a whole bunch of ambiguity can automatically calm the nervous system down. It's the same thing with like when someone is experiencing an emotion and the mere act of labeling the emotion actually results in a limbic response that's reduced.

1:37:09Spontaneity to me invites stillness, which is my best friend. Which is counterintuitive, I suppose. Yeah, it could be, which is good because lots of things in classical Dowson is all about paradox. But yeah, so, you know, the first part to spontaneity is that first is to distinguish it from impulsivity. I think lots of people think they are the same thing, but they're not. Impulsivity is somebody, you know, blurting out a response in class that has nothing to do with the topic. Impulsivity is decontextualized. Spontaneity is respecting the context, and it comes from intuition. When I say stillness, it's about, you know, being able to calm the chatter down in your mind to allow whatever natural response would emerge from the person in the first place.

1:37:57And the other part that is important is play. And play is also a primary emotional system in the work of Yak Pengsep. And, you know, you might wonder, why is play an emotional system? It's very strange to think of it that way. But let's think about what play does for our children, right? When your child is playing with a lot of other kids, they will automatically form social hierarchies. They will learn to develop empathy. If a kid is hitting another kid too much, they'll get casted out of the group. They will learn social skills. They will learn roles. Let me play doctor. Let me play Navy SEAL.

1:38:35I don't know. Let me play whatever. And so they sort of practice these different roles. And so play is very, very important for development and is also a system that's just as important for adults to have. How do adults practice play? A lot of it is, well, the moments that you find yourself joyful and spontaneous. Maybe when you're working out, maybe sometimes, I don't know if you find that to be play. No, zero. No, I do.

1:39:06Gabrielle Lyon:I do, actually. I find I'm my most creative. Okay. I'm sure you play with your kids. All the time. Yeah. Yeah. But even when you go out with your husband, I don't know what activities you do for fun. Rucking. Sorry? Rucking. Rucking. Okay. Pull-ups. Okay. Right. So everyone thinks we're fun. Everyone has their own version. Everyone, I'm sure there are other people. But that is, by what you're saying is probably picking up maybe a new hobby, like guitar or something like that. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, things that people can feel okay being sloppy about and just not censoring themselves in any way. Activities where they don't feel judged, where they can just be themselves.

1:39:45Gabrielle Lyon:And the last one, which makes the most sense, is transformation. Yeah. It's also a closer for creativity, like a loop in the sense that transformation is really now about embodied transformation. It's about realizing the creativity, the process, the relationship, the wholeness, all the different principles into one act. And what prevents transformation is usually resistance on one end and on another end, maybe something like a premature transformation. So some people jump too quickly into a change that they're not ready for. You know, as I think about all of these tools and kind of the framework, in real life, now I know that there's not going to be one answer, but how long does it take for someone to transform?

1:40:43Gabrielle Lyon:And I have my own thoughts on this, and I know it's totally complicated and individualized. It really depends on so many variables, the person's disposition, their personality types, their openness to change. I mean, is there a specific context maybe? I mean, you know, I have lots of context. You know, I was thinking about, you know, the 45-year-old who is listening to this and who maybe they want to operationalize your tools. And obviously they'll read the book. Maybe they'll come see you. But, you know, could they – and I've seen this happen, which is – I've seen people transform just – it's almost in an instant.

1:41:25Gabrielle Lyon:It's like the veil is ripped off their eyes and they never can go back to maybe a way or a thinking. I feel like, at least from my understanding, when that happens, there's usually a very transformative event that's experientially meaningful. Right. So there needs to be the intellectual stimulation, but also the emotional satisfaction that's involved with whatever the person learned, whatever insight they've gleaned. Sometimes this could be a self-transcendent experience, like I mentioned before, something like someone is moved to tears by, you know, watching someone else, I don't know, climb Mount Everest or something or whatever, whatever the situation is.

1:42:14Gabrielle Lyon:Sounds very difficult. but you meditate daily. Is that, is that right? Yeah. It's been a little more challenging with my little one. I've been trying to teach him to do some fun snuggle breathing practices, which he does once in a while. But yeah, I do meditation, but it's not just sitting meditation. It's also moving meditation. It's standing meditation. There's all sorts of different types that people aren't, I think, familiar with. But they usually think of someone just sitting down with their eyes closed, which I do do sometimes. That's called napitation. Napitation, right. Which I do every day, napitation.

1:42:50Gabrielle Lyon:Right. So I have a last question for you. And this is more for me, I suppose, if there's a parent listening to this right now. And obviously, you've been in this field for quite some time. You're analyzing people. You've done work with pathology. And you're moving into this space, I think, of just bringing more positivity. to the world. Sure. If, as a parent who's listening to this, is there one piece of advice that you would give? If I were them, I'd be much open to alloparenting, which is something that lots of hunter-gatherers do and we've done for a very long time. Accepting help from others is very important.

1:43:32We weren't meant for two working professionals to raise a child. It really does take a village to raise a child. And when you do allow other people into your life, obviously trusted people, grandparents, I don't know, aunts and uncles, you know, there are lots of benefits to that. First of all, you're exposing them to lots of other people, which does increase their exposure to bacteria and so forth, but that can increase their immune system. You increase their social skills. That's something that lots of anthropologists have mentioned that a lot of hundred gathers have great social skills at a very young age because of exposure to lots of people.

1:44:07Also, you can potentially prevent poor attachment. if you have two bad parents or one parent's bad, well, you have other allo parents that can be supportive and can be there. The amounts of times I've had clients come in and tell me how terrible their parents were, but they've somehow become resilient. And then I hear, oh, it's because they had their grandparent that was there 30 % of the time or whatever. In fact, if you look at these hunter-gatherer populations or the Hadza specifically, there was a statistic showing that only 40 % of the time did their child actually spend with their biological parents.

1:44:4560 % was with many other villagers. And so again, I think exposure to other people so that you don't burn out, right? It's so common. It's easy to become dysregulated. And the other part I would say, a piece of advice is to remember that not until a child is two years old, are they basically akin to a baby born in the animal kingdom outside of humans. And so they don't know really what's going on. They're not deceiving you at such a young age. They really, you know, they have needs and you're there to meet them. And quick responses to their cries doesn't spoil them. In this case of attachment, it's nurture that wins out.

1:45:31It's not survival of the fittest, it's survival of the nurtured, as Lou Causolino would say. But it rings very true. And so I would say all of that. I would say also that when it comes to education, that to let them explore on their own sometimes. You don't need to be a helicopter parent constantly micromanaging. Let them learn from older kids. Let them make mistakes. And I think it's, again, important to to let them, again, learn independently as well as through, you know, maybe, I don't know, the Emilio Reggiano or Montessori or whatever, you know, model.

1:46:11Gabrielle Lyon:Or the School of Hard Knocks. The School of Hard Knocks, right. Dr. Aldrich Chan, thank you so much. I really enjoyed this conversation. And I know that people are going to get a lot out of it. And just the way that you think and the way that you speak, and I'm going to link the book. And again, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for inviting me. It's been a true pleasure.