The 1 Macronutrient High Performers Skip After 60 | Arthur Brooks, PhD

20:44It's just, it's trying to eliminate pain. It's a big problem. It's interesting because, you know, the Buddhists talk about that. I've done a lot of work for the last 12 years with the Dalai Lama. I spent a lot of time, you know, in Dharamsala with, and we did a lot of conferences and writing and all that. And one of the things that he's impressed upon me is that suffering equals pain times resistance.

21:03Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Wait, I have to think about this one. Suffering equals pain. Mental or physical, affective or sensory, as you physicians like to talk about, multiplied by resistance to that pain. Meaning how much you push it away versus surrender. Yeah. And so you can have very high pain and very low suffering if your resistance to pain is low, which is what they tell you about back pain, by the way. You know, most people at some point in their life, because of our fundamentally flawed engineering, have back pain. My back hurts a lot because I have 35-degree scoliosis, and it hurts, right? But one of the things that I've learned is that when I wake up and especially hurting me in the morning, I'm like, My back hurts today.

21:43Let's go. Why? What have I just done? I've lowered my resistance to pain. And so even though my physical pain is high, my suffering is low.

21:49Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And is this a way, as someone is listening to this, that an individual could train happiness? And when you're purposively of your own agency deciding to lower your resistance to pain and your suffering falls concomitantly, that is pure agency. That is the essence of finding meaning in that suffering. That's how you find meaning in your suffering. And in point of fact, people who aren't suffering are not finding meaning. Is that true? Yeah, it really is. It really is. And so my students will often say, so, Professor, are you saying you have to go look for suffering? I say, don't worry. It'll find you.

22:23It'll find you. It'll find you. And if it'll find you every day, it'll find you every day. The real sign of the disciplined person is your basic approach when it does find you. It's like, oh, I'm about to learn something. I'm really about to learn something here. Right? And again, I'm not made of stone. It's not like I like it every day either, but you get 90 years on this planet to figure that one out, right? This is one of the reasons that 80-year-olds, they tend to be much happier than 30-year-olds, is because even if they haven't talked about this explicitly, they more or less have figured this out in a lot of cases.

22:57Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Does an individual have to, you know, we think about training. Yeah. With training, you have to increase the load or change the tempo or change the stimulus. If we become really good at suffering and we lower our resistance to it, do we have to find additional ways or put ourselves – because I imagine that the striver gets to a point where they've conquered stages, they've conquered books, they've conquered whatever that next frontier is. Right. They're always looking for trouble. Strivers are always looking for trouble. Why? Because they're doing progressive overload. That's what they're doing with their lives.

23:32They're looking for a new problem. Bring me a new problem. problem. And even when they don't think they want problems, once they've conquered a particular problem, they're looking for a different problem.

23:41Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Is that self-sabotage and a difficulty being able to be happy? Yes, it is. No, it's a good strategy for becoming stronger. It is a good strategy for finding more meaning, but it is a terrible strategy for enjoying your life. And this is one of the cases where the macronutrients are antagonistic to each other. You know, the kind of thing where your protein, your carbohydrates are working against each other in a way. And it really sort of enjoyment is the carbohydrates of life, right? The carbohydrates of your happiness. And so the whole point is that you do need a balance. I mean, you're not some sort of super ultra keto radical.

24:16You need carbohydrates. I mean, you want a balanced diet is what it comes down to. And we need that too. And so when you find somebody who has an incredibly restrictive diet that has all sorts of unintended consequences, typically for most people, and the same thing is true with strivers that are actually trying to work on their happiness equation toward the one thing they're really, really, really, really good at. And they're not getting a balanced meal.

24:39Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:You know, you and I were chatting before the cameras were rolling and you alluded to the idea that the mate a person chooses or doesn't choose will then affect long-term, is it fair to say long-term happiness? Yeah, for sure. It's actually basically the biggest predictor of day-to-day happiness in a person's life is a happy marriage. And if you make decisions when you are younger or continue to make poor decisions, does it become more difficult to find meaning and happiness? And again, meaning and happiness are not the same thing. Meaning is a component of happiness. Right. Yeah. So in early work on this that said that happiness and meaning were different because they were talking about happiness as a feeling, which it isn't.

25:24I mean, any more than the smell of your turkey is your Thanksgiving dinner. That's what feelings are. They're evidence of happiness, right? And so it's a good signal that there's something going on here. And if you're feeling very, very low happiness, that's when you need to go into your diet and find out what's wrong nutritionally with what you're actually doing. So the parallels work pretty well.

25:42Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:It does. And so if someone has made poor life choices and maybe they're looking back and they're going, gosh, you know, I feel so much regret that I didn't go to medical school or I didn't marry that nice girl. How can they reorient themselves to a future? Well, the same way that people who come to you. So you have people who have made very poor dietary choices and very poor fitness choices for a long, long time. And they're in their 40s or 50s and they come to you and say, Dr. Lyon, I mean, is it too late? And you say, no, it's not too late. I mean, it would have been better if we could wind back the clock and take you back to 22 and have you not be drinking every single night in college.

26:17But we are where we are and you can get better. Let's put you on a fitness program. Let's put you on a dietary program. And one thing I know is you're going to be better in a month than you are today and better in a year than you are today as well.

26:28Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:What are some of the biggest things that you see that sabotage happiness or even just greatness in general? Yeah. So a lot of it is just these misconceptions that people actually have. The biggest problem for sabotaging your happiness is trying to feel happy. Instead of doing something, it's like, I want to feel happy. I sure hope I feel happier tomorrow. that's a big problem because that that that's basically saying i sure hope that you know the turkey dinner smells a particular way it's just it's not it's too amorphous it's too unrelated to what you're actually doing it's kind of pushing on a string that you're hoping that the that the the effect of something is is something that will then you know relate back to the cause you want to do it the other way which is to say i want to know exactly what happiness is and i want to work toward the things that will bring enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.

27:18So thinking about feelings, and by the way, this is also what wrecks greatness, is this feelings-based culture. You know, people who are thinking about their feelings all the time, they're not going to the gym. People who are thinking about their feelings all the time are offended at work and quit. People who think about their feelings all the time, they can't stay married. You know, if love were a feeling, I wouldn't have been married 35 years. I wouldn't have been married 35 minutes. I'm married to a Spaniard. Our first fight was probably 28 minutes into the marriage.

27:45Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Or 28 minutes into meeting, totally. For sure. And so that's the whole thing. So number one is feelings. The second thing is this belief that Mother Nature wants us to be happy. You know, Mother Nature doesn't care about our happiness. Mother Nature cares about our fitness and our survival, our ability to pass on our genes, our ability to get through the winter, our ability to survive the night. That's what Mother Nature actually has made our brains to do. And here's the most amazing thing about this extraordinary supercomputer called the prefrontal cortex. It gives us a range of options beyond our animal impulses.

28:21Whereas, you know, my dog Chucho sees the cookie and eats the cookie. I can see the cookie and say, good cookie, I'm not eating it. Which is to say, I'm not living in the space of my animal impulse. I'm choosing to follow my moral aspiration. and when people don't feel like they have that agency to choose something they don't want. To choose something that they don't want. Or pass something that they do want. That's powerful.

28:43Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:How would someone choose something that they don't want? I don't want the truth, but I'm going to seek it anyway. That's moral aspiration over animal impulse is what it comes down to. And that, when you don't know that you've got that choice, when you think that if it feels good, do it. I mean, that led to a lot of ruined lives among the hippies. And today, the way it's ruining lives is the opposite, which is to say, if it feels bad, make it stop. That's a big problem. A culture of comfort is what's evolving. A culture, yeah, a culture of eliminationism, of discomfort. This idea that if something, it's like I tell my students, you know, I say, you're studying at the Harvard Business School.

29:18If you're not sad a lot and anxious a lot, you need therapy. You know, the whole idea that sadness and anxiety when you're doing something hard, like when you're in medical school, you're doing a hard thing on purpose. Of course you were getting aversive emotions. Of course you were. And if you said, okay, something's wrong with me, I'm broken. That's a second big mistake is thinking that Mother Nature cares about our happiness. And so we're not feeling happiness. Something is wrong. The third big mistake is that people think that they actually can be cosmically happy. And they can't because that's not our lot.

29:57What we can do is actually make progress.

30:00Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Why does recovery get harder? Why do gains become more elusive? The truth is you can't train your weight completely out of aging. But especially out of aging muscle, you can slow it down. Every moment, every workout, every lift depends on mitochondria producing energy efficiently. As we age, those mitochondria become less effective, impacting how our muscles perform. That's why I use Timeline, powered by MitoPure. MitoPure contains urolithin A, a nutrient shown to support mitochondrial renewal and muscle health at the cellular level. This provides your muscles with the energy they need, of course, to get results.

30:45Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Who doesn't want that? If you're already investing in training, protein, and recovery, do not overlook the cellular energy that powers it all. It's essential. At a time when everything feels more expensive, Timeline cut the everyday price of MitoPure. Today, you can get an additional 20 % off that new lower price at timeline.com slash lion. Don't miss it.

31:39breaks. That's right.

31:40Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And there's no guarantees. Right. And there's no soft place to land. And if there weren't this discomfort, it would just be so boring. It would be really boring. Decision making. Yeah. Is there a structure? You know, I think about this as the volume of information increases. Right. We likely need a system that we can filter out as to how a framework for how we make decisions. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think about this a lot. And there are a lot of behavioral science, there's a lot of behavioral science research and decision making. But as far as I'm concerned, so there's a couple of ways to think about this, a couple of formulas, because this is ultimately what you need.

32:18You need a heuristic, how to make a good decision. Now, there's two ways I'll talk about this. Number one is the way that you and I have seen in our families. Why? Because you're married to military. Two of my three kids are Marines.

32:31Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I know, it's amazing. I make Marines. And so I've seen this a lot, right? The way that Marine officers, my daughter's a Marine officer. You and I have talked about her a lot. She's a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. And the way that they teach them at the basic school at Quantico to make decisions is to get as much information as you can until you have 80 % situational awareness and then actually go forward. Then pull the trigger. Then make your decision. Less than 80%, this is an empirical observation. less than 80 % awareness of concreteness of how sure you are, people die. More than 80 % people die.

33:11Why? Because you're waiting too long. And this is the trade-off. How much information you have that you're accumulating and how long it takes you to make that decision. Okay. So then the second part of the decision-making framework is this. What are the data that you're actually accumulating? right and this goes to a different part of the literature you have tons of data anytime you make you need to make a decision especially if you're over 30 because you've lived a long time you can't put your finger on it but this is your episodic memory in your hippocampus which is your it's i mean it's just the the it's the hard drive and and you can't quite put your finger on why you know something but you know something and you have better pattern recognition you know that it's so weird competence it's a level of competence there's three pieces of data that you have when you have a hard decision.

33:55So a bunch of people watching us right now, they're thinking, should I marry him? Should I take that job? Should I move to Austin, Texas? These are the kinds of things, and they're agonizing over it. When you have a big decision, you have three pieces of data. You have three basic sensations that are based on what you know and you've experienced. Those basic sensations are excitement, your level of excitement. Number two is your level of fear. and number three is your level of deadness, sense of emptiness. So for example, you'll say to a woman about a guy she doesn't love, how do you feel about marrying him?

34:31How does it make you feel? And she feels dead inside, right? That's what I mean by deadness. These are the three sensations.

34:37Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So it's a level of maybe neutrality, would you say? Well, it's not even that. It's kind of like I feel empty inside, you know? So if you asked me to be a college president or something, it's an important job. I'm a lifelong academic. It makes me feel dead inside. Like, I don't want to. I'm glad people are doing it. I've got a great present. I'm glad I'm not doing it. It makes me feel dead inside. And would that still translate to smaller decisions? So here's the proportion of it. Here's the 80 % situational awareness. The ideal combination of these sensations is 80 % excitement for doing that thing, 20 % fear, not less.

35:13Less than 20 % fear, you're going to be bored.

35:16Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Wait, less than 20 % fear? Less than 20 % as a general rule. It has to be a little risky. And that means 20 % fear means real fear of actual possibility of failure. If you do this thing, right? You have to have a 20 % fear factor and you should be as close to 0 % deadness as possible. 80-20-0. When you actually feel like you know that it's 80-20-0 at 80 % sureness, go. That's the decision making criterion. And again, it's not perfect. It's not perfect. But this is a certain way of saying, should I leave my current job is because it's fallen out of those proportions too much. It's become like 10 % excitement and 5 % fear and 85 % deadness.

35:59You got to go is what it comes down to. But that's the way to think about these things. So basically, for everyone listening, that frankly simplifies a lot of things. Yeah. It's sort of, it seems sort of unscientific, but it has a lot of empirical backing because we know more than we understand. We have more data that we can.

36:16Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:We know more than we understand. Yeah. Yeah. We have a knowing about all the things in our lives. And so this is why your gut is so critically important that you'll be in touch with the knowledge that you have innately. And so when you say to yourself, yeah, you know what? I think I'm pretty confident. I think I'm 80 % confident that I am at, I am not at 80-20-0. And so therefore I'm not going to do this thing or I'm pretty close to that. I'm going to do this thing. But that's kind of these, you're tending toward the, these are all these things are heuristic benchmarks. because we need to be able to make decisions in a particular way.

36:49And this is incredibly reassuring for a lot of people. When I present this to my students, it helps them decide, should I go to J.P. Morgan or go to Citibank, you know, or whatever it happens to be.

36:58Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I have been seeing something in clinic. And actually, I got a message from a very successful patient. And he said, you know, I've been on a GLP-1. And over the last eight months, I am not as excited about things. Yeah. I'm sure this is classic. I'm sure that you've seen that GLP-1 receptors are in the brain and the gut, obviously. And when you turn down the reward for food, there seems to also be a decrease in sexual desire, in motivation. And now we're going to have millions of people on these medications that might even temper their fear or addiction or desire. Yeah, people spontaneously stop smoking.

37:44Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So how are we going to be able to make good decisions within the era of pharmacological agents? Yeah. So this is, and this is an older question, not just GLP-1s. And Johan Hari talks about the fact that it tends to significantly increase suicide is when people are on, which is not to say that people should stop taking GLP-1s or they should be even afraid of this. What it means is that sometimes when life's little rewards aren't there, that it makes life feel, you know, less fun to live day to day. And if so, if you're really, really on the edge and all that means is you got to be super conscious if you're taking something that's changing your brain.

38:22if something's going to be affecting your brain know that the knowledge is actually the power so you're not being it's like you know anybody who's adjusting their hormones lots and lots of guys my age are on trt and they don't understand why they don't feel like themselves and they think it's something wrong with their psychology no man it's biology and if you actually understand that that you know exogenous testosterone is going to change your mood it's going to change something's good but something's not good then you have power over it because you understand that that's actually happening and that's what comes down to it so when people are taking glp1s they're like i don't feel like i'm digging in i used to really like eating a twinkie you know i don't like to i feel like these little rewards are missing from my life don't get depressed then you understand this is important another case of this by the way is people were on ssris now what do ssris do i mean they they they keep more serotonin in the synapse which lowers your level of rumination and activity in the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex that we talked about before it lowers your rumination level.

39:18Great. You don't have as much room to sadness, but people say it's harder to fall in love because you're not ruminating on another person in the same way.

39:26Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And then do people make different choices? If we have these four type of, not personalities, but we have these traits, right, that are necessary, like the poet or the striver, and we start to adjust them, do you worry about the future's decision-making capacity? A little bit. I mean, there are certain cases, you know, personal decision-making. There's really interesting research, no doubt you see. You probably participated in this literature, where when women from their teenage years are on hormonal birth control, and then they get married, and they come off hormonal birth control for the first time in a decade and a half.

40:06Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:They don't like their husbands. They don't like their husbands. And the reason is because they're attracted in a different hormonal milieu to a different kind of man, right? And so that's the kind of personal decision-making you're like, whoops. Now, it's not like, and again, we don't want to alarm anybody who's watching this, but if you know, then you have power is what it comes down to. So yeah, for sure. I mean, we're altering our brains all the time. And the trouble is that, you know, I mean, you're telling your patients this. Most doctors aren't. I'll take this. No, no, no, no. You'll be fine.

40:35Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I'm incredibly rigorous about what holds a permanent place in my regular protocol. And thanks to one of the sponsors of this episode, Bond Charge Red Light Face Mask earned it. Now, let's be honest, between running a practice, recording podcasts, traveling, and raising two children, this is a full-time job. Okay, time is actively trying to age me, I am telling you, but I'd like to keep my skin as healthy as I can for long. But I'm not interested in spending a ton of money on trendy nonsense. What caught my attention is the science. Bond Charge uses red light at 630 nanometers and near infrared light at 850 nanometers.

41:19Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:These are wavelengths that have been studied for their role in photobiomodulation, a process that supports cellular energy production and healthy skin. What keeps me using it is how easy it is. 10 minutes a day, completely wireless. Wireless. You heard me right. I wear it while reading or working at night. And now you will also look like a 1980s sci-fi character while wearing it. But friends, that is a sacrifice I am willing to make for efficiency and effectiveness. If you're looking for a science-backed tool that fits into real life, Bond Charge delivers. Go to bondcharge.com, That's B-O-N-C-H-A-R-G-E dot com to save 15 % on your Bond Charge red light face mask.

42:07Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Code Dr. Lion for 15 % off. Bond Charge dot com. You have contributed a lot to this idea of happiness and loneliness and really highlighting that. If you could change something for people, and Matt and I were talking about this before, Or we agreed that you wouldn't want to eliminate their suffering or their push. And, you know, it's funny. You've also developed Marine officers. I mean, you produce a certain type of human. What would you want other people? If they're listening, they're raising kids or they're raising themselves. Again, you've covered so much. What's the one big thing I do? What do you need them to do?

42:55Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:or you do. The one big alteration today that I would recommend to everybody is be paying more attention to the way that people interact with tech. This is the one big thing that parents need to be paying more attention to, that all young adults need to be paying attention to. This book about meaning, it's basically in response to a crisis of meaning, that after 2008, the sense of meaninglessness in people's lives skyrocketed. I mean, you couldn't find that many people who said, my life feels meaningless. Like French existentialists, I don't know. people smoking filterless cigarettes in cafes in Paris.

43:25You know, my life feels meaningless. I mean, it's like, what does it even mean? It's like a New Yorker cartoon or something, right? But after 2008, you found that that started to explode. And this is the biggest predictor of depression and anxiety for young adults, particularly people in their 20s. People under 30 is what you see in the data. It's like, whoa, what does it actually correspond to? It corresponds to screen use. It corresponds to the way that we use our brains, which is what my main area of research over the past couple of years has been on how this has affected hemispheric lateralization.

43:55The two sides of the brain that you need to be able to function, to be happy, to have a good life. The right side of the brain is all the why, the mystery, the meaning, the love and transcendence. The left side is the analysis, the engineering, the information, the data, the how to and what. You need both, but you're incompetent. Either life doesn't have any meaning or you can't get anything done. And that's how our brains were designed. I mean, they're They're wonderfully, miraculously designed. But when you basically turn one hemisphere off because of the way that you're interacting with the culture and the culture of tech in particular, you're going to suffer.

44:30And so a lot of parents, they don't understand. It's like, oh, what's wrong with my son? My son, he came back from college and he's just like living in the basement smoking weed. And, you know, he's just on the Internet all day long. And what's going wrong is his brain isn't working right.

44:45Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Do you think that we will ever adapt to, you know, I think about evolution and I think about how species adapt to their environment. Yeah. And you talk a lot about God and... The metaphysical parts of life. Yes. One would say that this is all part of a greater plan. Right. And we are, I believe that human beings are made to do incredible things. That we're generative creatures, that we're searchers, we're seekers by nature. And religious people would say that's because we're made in God's image and God is generative, that God's a creator. And so he made the little creators. That's us. Sometimes we do it for good things in our lives.

45:25And sometimes we create things that are not so great. I mean, we eliminate small problems and create major crises.

45:34Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:We eliminate. I love that. Yeah, we do this all the time. We eliminate small problems. It's like I got a headache and I found that when I actually eat some of the bark off this tree that I feel a little bit better. and then I turn it into aspirin and then I make non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and then from there I have analgesic narcotics and then pretty soon 100 ,000 people a year are dying of drug overdoses. Now, I'm not saying that we're evil. I'm just saying that there's consequences of our generativity and our creativity sometimes. And the classic case is this incredible ingenuity that led to the elimination of boredom.

46:02You know, I've done...

46:03Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I know, I've read and I've heard you talk about how we should be bored. Yeah, and boredom is incredible because we are evolved to be bored. That turns on the default mode network in our brains which leads to mind wandering, flights of fancy meaning. But it's boring and we don't like it. And so we've figured out ways to get rid of it. So boredom is a classic case of, you know, we have figured it out. This is the way that we use smartphones largely to eliminate boredom. And in so doing, what we've done is we've largely, we've turned off the right hemisphere of our brain. We use our brains suboptimally in such a way that it's all how to and what information we didn't ask for.

46:40and we're not even exploring the why of our lives and that's what's leading to the meaning crisis. So the one piece of advice I give to young people is learn to have the right relationship with your devices, which you absolutely can't. This book has protocols on how to do that based on science. Give me one. For example, tech-free times during the day, you don't have to throw your smartphone in the ocean and join a monastery unless that's your thing. It just means the neurocognitive programming that comes from the first hour of the day, Use that. I mean, you and I, when we first wake up, you got to make sure nothing's on fire.

47:14You look at it and put it down. Don't look at it for the next hour. Don't look at it the first hour of the day. So you're cognitively programming your day to not be all about the screen every single second. You know, it's interesting that research on nervous tics, which is a Tourette tic syndrome, is so interesting because you can actually help people not actually do the tic in the first hour. They're probably going to be free for the rest of the day. That's how this neurocognitive programming works, right? your brain is funny. I mean, it's path dependent is what. So the first hour of the day, mealtimes, because we're made to have this oxytocin exchange, this neuropeptide exchange while we're eating.

47:53It's part of our diversity of biology. Don't eat alone. Don't have your phone, not even on the table face down, because that will interrupt the oxytocin production in your brain.

48:01Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I do not know that. Yeah. And so if you look at it, you'll think, is there something on that? And it will interrupt the oxytocin exchange with your husband. And so, and so during meals and your kids, the number one predictor of your kids looking at their phones during meals is you looking at your phone during meals. Right. And number three is last hour of the day. And part of that is, you know, blue light and pineal gland and melatonin and sleep architecture, all the stuff we already know. But part of it is really how we finish the day, how we understand the day, which is super important for relationships and a lot of other stuff, meaning that you shouldn't be sleeping with your phone either.

48:34And just these little things can be, and there's policies too, by the way, there shouldn't be a single phone in a single classroom from kindergarten through PhD in America. And yet 28 states still have unfettered access to phones, even in elementary school. So these are the things that we can do, that parents can do, that young adults can do. This is not throwing your phone away. You're not going to become lonely. You're not going to become isolated. You're simply going to take care of yourself. Morning protocols are the most important thing. I have very strict morning protocols. Do you ever miss them?

49:05Very rarely because I find that seven days a week is easier than four.

49:09Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:It is. It's so, I mean, it's like for me. That's why I don't like going on vacation. Do you like going on vacation? You feel very, at least I. Yeah, your kids are little too. So vacation is sort of stressful. Yes. Yeah. But vacation is supposed to be a break from your routines, but breaks from my routines are kind of hard. Now it is important because strivers struggle with enjoyment. And so trying to make sure you're staying in protocol keeps you with satisfaction and meaning because you're driving, driving, driving, driving and making progress. How does someone know if they're a driver or maybe there's a level below that or a striver?

49:46Well, if actually the idea of doing things that people find to be really enjoyable bum you out, then you know. I mean, it's a pretty obvious self-test. If you basically say, I don't like going on vacation, then we got to work on your enjoyment. And I'm right with you. I'm right with you. I completely understand that. But, you know, I'm on the road 48 weeks a year, you know, for my work. I'm constantly going, I'm out between two and four nights a week, 48 weeks a year. And that means that I have to be really, really strict about making sure that I can undertake my morning protocols, notwithstanding the jet lag or whatever the time change is or the hotels that I'm staying in and boom, boom, boom.

50:21Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And if you stopped that, what would happen? I think there would be downstream implications because each of the things that I do plays into something that's important to me in my life. And were you able to make those decisions with the 80-20? Yeah. Yeah. A lot of it was 80-20, but also it was just experimentation. So my life is a lab. I'm experimenting on myself constantly. I spent a few days last summer in Stockholm with Brian Johnson. I didn't know him before. And he said something that really affected me. And, you know, you look at the stuff that he does and you're like, really? But then he said something that actually convicted me a little bit.

50:57He said, I'm doing these things. I don't know if everything works. I'm doing them to me because I don't want to experiment on you. And so I really respected that. And so the spirit of experimentation on oneself is really generative as long as you're paying attention to the results. And I just really, really, really like the results. Could I relax it? my wife asked me this a lot. And answer's probably. I probably could. And at some point, we're going to have to. At some point, you're going to have to. And I'm sure you're thinking about that. I am thinking about it. And it's actually quite disconcerting.

51:34You know, I just turned 62. What does that mean? That means that in five years, it'll be 67. And five years, it'll be 72. And you're not going to be able to do it forever. So it's important to actually have a cadence to this kind of thing and to have a flexibility fundamentally, be able to alter these particular protocols and not to be rigid.

51:50Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I'm always on the lookout for cognitive enhancers, things to help mental focus and stamina. Listen, cognitive focus is just as critical to execution as training or nutrition. I first heard about nicotine and its potential positive effects on cognition during my geriatric fellowship. And thanks to the sponsor of this episode, Lucy. Now, a meta-analysis of 41 double-blind placebo-controlled studies found significant positive effects of nicotine on six performance domains. Nicotine itself has demonstratable short-term cognitive enhancing properties at low doses, particularly for attention and shows neuroprotective potential in preclinical models of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease.

52:36Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Thank you to one of our sponsors, Lucy, which is an extremely high quality nicotine gum with superior texture and long-lasting flavor that doesn't get chalky or dry out. They offer great strength options and the espresso flavor is my personal go-to, especially during heavy podcasting days, much like this one. Though, if you aren't sure where to start, their mint and mango flavors are also incredible. For a premier, top-tier nicotine gum that holds its flavor and keeps up with my day and hopefully yours, Lucy's hands down my favorite. Get 20 % off your first order when you buy online at lucy.co slash Dr.

53:20Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Lyon with promo code Dr. Lyon. That's lucy.co slash Dr. Lyon with promo code Dr. Lyon. And if you don't want to wait, check out their store locator to find where you can pick up Lucy near you. Lucy products are only for adults of legal age. and every customer's age verified. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Do you find you are most creative when you're moving? Yeah, for sure. And that's that ambulation literature. That stuff is super interesting, right? But also when you're interacting, so you said something about Brian Johnson versus being alone with your thoughts.

54:02Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:You hear a lot about the way that these poets do it or how people become creative. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And there's that, what is that, that those papers that came out of, was it Berkeley or Stanford? I can't remember that talked about, you know, people were asked to do a creative task when they were sitting versus when they were walking and, and then to make control, to make sure that it actually wasn't just outside, they would, they would roll people in a wheelchair and to see it. And idea generation was like 60 % higher. I mean, it's, it's quite dramatic. And there've been times in my life when I actually needed a fundamental change and I couldn't get to that 80 % threshold.

54:37I couldn't get to 80-20-0 with enough sureness that I actually had to do a long walk. And so twice I've actually done the Camino, which is a walk across northern Spain. It's day after day after day. It's hundreds of miles. And what I say, you break yourself down walking and what you find is very interesting. There's an ancient mystical tradition. It's not that you find what you're looking for. It's that what

55:02Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:you're looking for finds you and you feel very confident in that yeah it's it it's man it works it's so weird the meaning of your life as i was reading it one of the anchors is your belief in god your spirituality right if someone doesn't have that and you talk about that in the later part of the book um but if someone doesn't have that how do you think their guardway guardrails for operation. It's just part of an idea called transcendence. So transcendence, when it comes to happiness, is not dependent on a particular path. I have my own particular path. I was raised as a Christian and I practice.

55:40I go to mass every day. It's just part of my protocol. I heard that.

55:44Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I thought that I misheard it. Yeah, no, I go to mass every day. And, you know, that's a Catholic thing. I mean, the great thing about being in the Catholic church, it's like Starbucks. I mean, it's just, it's a franchise system. It's a uniform product that's excellent and you find it almost any place. Even when you're traveling. Yeah, yeah. Like this morning here. because we're recording this in Austin, Texas. And, you know, and I have, you know, there's an app. It's like, where's the next mass? And so it's actually not that hard for me to do it as long as I'm committed to doing it. Other people will do Vipassana meditation every day.

56:13People have different particular practices. The whole point, however, the benefit when it comes to meaning and happiness, I'm not going to make the metaphysical claim about who's right. That's a different question, right?

56:22Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I know, I've read you say that you're not doing that. I'm not doing that. But when it comes to happiness, you have to get above yourself. You have to get out of what William James calls the me-self into the I-self, where you're looking at out and standing in awe of something greater than yourself. And so for some people, for our friend Ray and Holiday, he talks about the Stoic philosophers. And he has a very, very strong sense of transcendence based on Stoicism. Some people do Vipassana. Some people will study the fugues of Bach. Some people will do the Brahma Mukhurta, which is walking for an hour before dawn, which I've done for years.

56:56And it's really, it's a very, very beautiful thing. A little hour-long pilgrimage when the sun is coming up. Some people practice the faith of their youth, but the whole point is you need a transcendent practice. That's where the benefit comes.

57:08Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Do you need to do that when you are young? No, no, no. People find it at different points in life. People change over the course of their lives, too. There's an interesting thing. There's a guy named James Fowler, a sociologist, who talks about the cadence of people's religious pilgrimage over the course of their life. And he finds that young adults, they tend to, if they're raised religious, a lot of them fall away. So what Fowler finds is that people tend to fall away, even if they're from really religious backgrounds, because they come to this cognitive dissonance. They're like, yeah, you know, I've learned about a good God in Sunday school or, you know, but I'm looking around.

57:43There's kids who are sick, and there's economic inequality, and there's war, and there's environmental degradation, and there's injustice, and I don't believe it.

57:52Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:How are you raising your kids? Were they raised? They're being raised in a very Orthodox family. And that's not to say that they won't have their own journey and their own questions. People tend to come back to religion in their 40s. So you're saying I'm doing the right thing. You're doing the right thing, but you're doing the natural thing. And part of the reason is because you're at the point in your life now where, of course, things don't make sense. I mean, they don't make sense. It's like nothing makes sense. Okay, well, since life is really messy, there's a lot I don't understand, I'm going to do that thing because I like that thing.

58:21even if it's not completely consistent with everything that I read and that everybody tells me, that's okay. You actually become comfortable with a messy world in your 40s when you weren't in your 20s is what it comes down to. Now, not everybody. Some people stay religious. All three of my kids are very traditionally religious. And I have one son, my oldest son, who has gone to mass most days since he was a teenager, as a matter of fact.

58:44Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And this helps with the transcendence because... This is a good way. It's a very efficacious way to get it as traditional religion. But it's not the only way. Would another way be military service? Yeah, well, it can be. Military service is, it structures and regiments people's lives. It makes people's lives orderly. And so what that does is it sets a kind of a, it creates a canvas on which you can do the painting of transcendence. So it sets the stage more effectively. It's not religion per se. You go to mass every day. Yeah. You are consistent. You train. You're very good with your nutrition.

59:18Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I mean, look at you, for 62, you're fitter than, I would say, easily, 75 % of Americans who are either overweight or obese or not training. And I'm in better shape than I was when I was in my 30s. Which is extraordinary. And the stimulus has to change. Do you ever get to a place as you think about how you are bringing the best version of yourself that you have to add, for example, another day where in order to transcend, you have to up the ante? Sometimes what I'm trying to do is I'm changing the stimulus as much as I'm actually adding to the stimulus. And part of the reason is because my core life goals, they don't tend to, they're not revolving around what I'm doing in the gym.

1:00:00That's really keeping the saw sharp. That's what it comes down to. So it's not as if, you know, what I'm doing as part of these basic protocols with my nutrition, for example, it's not that that's not where my sense of life progress is coming in, but my life progress can't occur unless those things are on point.

1:00:17Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:How do you know if you're making it? Yeah. You know, this is, this is a white jury. Do people ask you this? Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, and that's, that's my problem. That's my problem because there's never enough. There's never enough. I can't stop. You know, that's the striver's lament. Right. And I've absolutely, I've, I see this in others. I don't have a clinical practice like you, but I'm a teacher and, and, and, and I work with some of the most high performing people in the world and what they struggle with is that there's never enough. It's not money. It's the feeling of progress. It's actually, I want to, I see the beautiful city on the hill and I got to make progress toward it.

1:00:55And, and there's a real sense of insecurity about actually stopping, which is one of the reasons that enjoyment is so hard for me and for many of the people that I actually work with, because enjoyment makes you feel like the city on the hill is getting further away. is what it comes down to. So that's my weakness. Now, that weakness, by the way, has an origin story with a lot of people like us and watching us here. And it starts in childhood. The origin story is that when you're a kid, I bet you got really good grades when you were a little girl, right? I did. I bet you were smart and motivated, hardworking.

1:01:26Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I love the presidential fitness test all this time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I bet you got a lot of attention from your, and a lot of, and your parents gave you a lot of love for that. I mean, they were probably impressed by that. They gave you a lot of compliments for that. And probably a lot of adults said, Gabrielle, you're number one. And that made you feel really, really good. That's great. The trouble with that is... There's a dark side to that. We're very careful about that with our kids. Of course, because when your brain is really synaptically plastic, what you record is that love is earned, that I got attention from my parents and from my teachers when I did an extremely important thing, which makes you less of a human being into a human doing, as they say.

1:02:05And the problem with that is that love isn't earned. It can't be earned. Love is a free gift freely given. Love is a grace. And if you do that, there's a tendency for you to surround yourself with people who will adore you, people who and who are effectively using you and making you earn their love. I know people who marry people who make them earn their love because that's what they think love is. You know, the men will marry women who, you know, if you're not bringing home more and more bacon, then see ya. You know, and that's earning. That's a love earning. And by the way, she doesn't love you, guys.

1:02:37She doesn't love you. Because she should love you unemployed is what it comes down to. So that's the problem that strivers have is they spend their lives. It's like, do you love me yet? Okay, let me go work harder. Am I lovable yet? Are enough people clapping? Do I have enough people watching my podcast? Did my book make the list? You know, all those dumb metrics, all they are are these blunt instrument ways to gauge whether or not we've earned the right to be loved. That's the strivers' lament.

1:03:06Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Is it external or internal? And the reason I ask this is because, you know, I look at my daughter and she's physically gifted. She's good at everything. And when she has to try, she falls apart. If she's not number one, unfortunately, this girl is a mess. My son, Leonidas, he is smaller. Unfortunately, he's my size. And that kid is tough as nails. He doesn't expect to be good. He is aggressive. He knows that he has to try. And I just think that it has nothing to do with us giving or taking love. We tell them that we love them. We try to always encourage the effort, not the outcome. Right. But my daughter is externally driven and my son is all it's all this intrinsic drive.

1:03:59No doubt there is a natural component to this that some people you could you could have the most hardcore tiger parents, you know, that withhold love when you're not actually achieving and they're still fine.

1:04:11Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:It's like the emotional death. Yeah, no doubt. And just as the PANIS profiles are highly genetic, no doubt there's a competitive edge that actually sits on the genome someplace. You know, some people are just extremely competitive and some people want the external validation. Some people are just craving extrinsic rewards. And what these people need the most, more than your daughter needs more than your son, is an understanding of intrinsic rewards and not the extrinsic rewards. And it's very easy to motivate these extrinsic kids with extrinsic rewards. These are the kids where you pass the marshmallow test.

1:04:43Yeah, so the marshmallow test. These are the kids who, you know, they will, if you basically say, I will give you a second cookie if you climb Mount Everest, they will go climb Mount Everest because of what that represents. Yeah, totally. That represents the love of the world. These are the people who have to get a million Instagram followers. Even though a million Instagram followers is a stupid metric. It's a trivial metric. It's writing your life in disappearing ink. And yet it's like a tangible marker that I'm making progress in this life. And that I'm more meritorious than I was yesterday.

1:05:17And that maybe somebody loves me. And so people who are naturally like this and look, we all have kids who are different. I got three kids. I have four grandkids. They're all different. And the result is you got to watch for the one who's most extrinsically motivated. And these are the ones you have to apply the greatest intrinsic love to and have them understand the most that love can't be earned.

1:05:39Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:As people listening to this, we've got parents, we have physicians, we have all types of people. One thing is for sure is they want to learn to be better. Yeah. They absolutely want to learn to be better for sure. And they tend to be super hard charging strivers for sure. But they won't actually find the love that they seek until they can actually understand what the true nature of love is. And different people find it in different ways. I mean, this is people who kind of work with married couples. And that's your next adventure, isn't it? Yeah. The next book is called Falling in Love and Staying in Love.

1:06:09that's going to come out in 2028. You know, the incredible science of romance and, you know, how to find the right person, how to have the falling in love process be healthy and good, the neurochemical cascade that happens in our brains when we're falling in love and how to stay in love with the person that you've chosen.

1:06:25Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Which is going to be more important now than ever, especially with the social media landscape. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, and not to mention just whole the culture, this tarrant telling us that militates against pair bond mating, which is how we, not very romantically, how we, as a scientist, start talking about, you know, marriage. But we have all these dumb messages about ideas that don't work. You know, things where, I mean, what we want is to be pair bondmated for life. We want to love a person. And that's natural. That is what is. You know, it's just no evidence. I mean, it's like what we, what Homo sapiens in the environment are sort of serially pair bondmated.

1:06:59But the ideal is permanent pair bondmating. That's why you don't, you don't say. Wait, wait, what do you mean by that? Well, because in your wedding day, so your animal impulse is serial pair bond mating, but your moral aspiration is permanent.

1:07:11Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So on your wedding day, you don't like, let's see how it goes. You don't say that. You know, it's like 15 years. That sounds about right. No. I mean, it's like, tell death to us part. You said 32. 35. 35. 35 in November, you know. And so the point of that is that it requires, given the fact that it's in the space, not just of animal impulse, but of moral aspiration, which is what we really want, that you got to be good at it. And you have to take it seriously. And you have to not make stupid errors like anything else. And it's like taking care of your body. You practice it. Totally. Just like you talk about training happiness.

1:07:44We have protocols. There's protocols. There's things that you can actually learn.

1:07:48Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Arthur Brooks, you are extraordinary. Mary, really, you're teaching the world things that we all need to know. Thank you. I'm such a fan of what you do. And I've been, even before we met, before we talked for the first time, I've been listening to you and watching you for years. And you've really made my life better. I really appreciate that. And you make my life better. And all of the listeners and the viewers, really, you've just been a tremendous voice for people. So thank you so much. Thank you.

1:08:20Thank you.