Manage Your Mental Mess and Change Your Life in 5 steps

22:14It sets you into it, opens your mind that you can actually then face the day. So that's one thing you can do. I've got a whole thing there that you can do, a sleep neurocycle for children as they wake up. Then if you see there's a pattern of children not sleeping, it's to find a time during the day that's a good time. Either early evening when they've been to school, they've had dinner, they've played. That's sort of a good time to kind of work around. But you can find, don't do this when they're exhausted. it and then you can do a whole neuropsycho to try and work through what the cause could be.

22:42When we don't sleep, the main reason we don't sleep, and a lot of people will maybe not agree with me here, but the main reason we don't sleep is because we have unresolved issues that we're scared of. It changes your energy in your brain and your brain, all the things, the melatonin, all those things, because there's so many cases and I actually give a case in the study in the book of quite a traumatic situation of a child who was abused physically and sexually from three months of age but just could not sleep through the night and they did everything all the sleep aids all the white noise everything you can possibly do and not that those don't work they are definitely going to facilitate and help but the core issue was the child's abuse and what the impact of that although the child was out of that unsafe environment that you had to deal with what was going on and that child was very young so once the parent just happened to come across my stuff and do the neuropsychal and the child saw the parent doing it and started doing it and within four days this child was sleeping now this was an eight-year-old i didn't what they didn't use this book because this book wasn't out yet the child saw what the mom was doing so the change in the mom because if the kids watch us and this was an eight-year-old and said i want to do what you're doing and so she adapted it as best she could and this child started sleeping within four days so the core issue there was a trauma that was unresolved and you said it yourself i know i do If I've got something that I haven't dealt with or something's worried me or I have that phone call before bed that's it, my sleep's gone until I've dealt with it.

24:07Can I give you one with children that I think is unsaid? And I know you're such a person of faith, so I'm going to give you what helps me sleep. And it leads to this unresolved stuff. And I just want to say this to everybody. It's prayer. And let me say why. So prayer at night is a chance for me to take my burdens and put them on my higher power. In my case, Jesus. but whatever your faith is. And I know you share my faith. And I wonder how many people are praying with their children at night, because this is an opportunity for your children to probably open up. I think it's an opportunity for them to relieve themselves of their burdens.

24:43And I have found that when I have really deep, beautiful prayer, even if it's brief, that I sleep better at night, because there's a perspective that I get that I'm protected. And I really wonder that. The second thing is, I want to ask you about both these. So this is for adults, but it also affects our children. More and more, our children are on their screens late at night. I know this is just a brain issue. So I'm not just necessarily trauma, but there's all this data about blue screen time and how it's difficult to sleep. I don't know if it's accurate or not, but I know there's, when you're doing homework, it's stressful.

25:16I think people let their children do their homework too late at night. And now that's a problem. Now it's a stressor. Now it's a trauma. Also they're on their screen. And a lot of these schools put so much homework on their children. It's just being real. Yeah, the school system is a problem. So when your kids get home from school, wouldn't it be smarter to get them, A, to start doing their homework earlier so they're off of their screens and away from stressful stuff before sleep? Also true for you as an adult. And just prayer. I know it's not a major part of what's happening in here, but am I right that both of those things would probably make an impact on sleep and maybe then their mental health?

25:49Absolutely. You know, if you look at prayer in terms of any religion or any philosophy or any belief, if people don't even believe in anything, it can be seen as a way of just trying to organize yourself and then believe that it's not just me, there's something more. And we know what's common to all mankind, and that's love. So, you know, to talk to a child about loveness, so you could do a loveness neurocycle. You could call it a prayer neurocycle, whatever you want. But you can actually say, okay, well, let's look at what am I feeling right now? And why do we think we feel that? And you can go through the five steps, and that's your prayer.

26:24And your little active reach could maybe be in some, quote, a little scripture. It could be a visualization of something, whatever, a beautiful quote or something like that. So that is basically a form of prayer because you're tuning into an unconscious, which is your spirit, which is your wisdom, which is your – and you're teaching a child to do that. So, yes, it is a form of unloading your burdens into either you believe it's Jesus, God, loveness, whatever. I love to talk about godness and loveness because that's something that's relatable to anyone. Everybody, right. You know, so you kind of step into that space.

26:51And there's so much physics behind this too and quantum physics and science behind how you're collapsing the consciousness. And, I mean, it's just we could talk for another two hours about that. So, yes, totally, I do believe that. And it'll set your brain waves to a point where your brain can start shifting into sleep mode, which will then have a neurochemical effect on the melatonin and those kinds of things and controlling adrenaline. And so it will have, it has, what I've shown with my work is that when you use mind stuff and specifically the tool of the neuro cycle, which is mind management.

27:20And as I said, you can put whatever you want in that. You are changing your psychoneurobiology. So you're changing cortisol levels. You're changing homocysteine levels. You're changing all the things that can keep you awake. You are getting them to the point where that you're dropping, changing, getting brain balance with the brain waves, that kind of stuff. So it's real. I mean, that's very, very real. I don't think I've done an interview in like 45 or 50 minutes with more stuff. We've done thought trees. We've done the neuro cycle. We've done the non-conscious mind. We've done all of these different things here.

27:49We've done the highlight reel, which I kicked in here today. If I was to ask you, I get to ask you one more question. Did you want me to answer the second part of the other question? Yes, yes, yes. What was the second part of the other question? The second part of the other question was blue screen time. Oh, yes, okay. Bullying, social media, all that stuff, it's immersed us in stimulation. So it's good, very good, and bad. All we need to do is teach our kids to manage it. That's the key. It's not going away. So it's not a bad thing if we know how to manage it. So it's just finding what works for you and your family.

28:22In terms of blue screens and all those things, there's a lot of science that supports and contradicts the concept. Listen, if a person's worked up, it doesn't matter what you do about blue screens. They're still going to stay awake. So sometimes people, if they're relaxed enough and they're watching their film or whatever before they go to sleep, it's not going to be an issue. It's very much up to the individual. It's how we are managing it. You've got to experiment with your child and with yourself and see what works for you. That's really important. So it's that bio-individual aspect. But just to bear in mind, if we don't manage the immersion that we live in.

28:50Before, for example, very quick, kids would get bullied at school. That's not anything new. Bullying has been around since the beginning of time. The difference is it follows them home now. It's 24. It's the immersion. It's an immersion experience versus an intermittent experience. And when you have that distinction, that's what – so we have to learn to manage the immersion. So, I mean, I can go for hours about that alone. But that kind of gives you a... Well, by the way, I would love you to stay for hours. I would actually love that. Unfortunately, you have somewhere to go. I can sit here all day if you want.

29:16I know. I could stay all day chatting to you as well. Let me ask you one last question because I think people want to know this. I have a very good friend, I've been thinking about the entire interview, who has a child that's just really had chronic struggles with mental health issues over and over to the point where they've done cutting and... Self-harm. It's gotten really severe. And that child probably, in my opinion, should be more physically active I know they have prayer in their life that neural cycle could be a game changer for them. So I can't wait for them to hear this. I really, really believe the neural cycle could be a game changer.

29:46And I think that maybe in 63 to a certain amount of days, if it's more traumatic, you said a little bit longer, that someone can create positive and or remove negative things in their life. Balance the two together. When is, I guess the last question I would have for today is because it's worth asking. When is it time for medication with somebody in their brain? Is that something that you must believe in some cases if someone's schizophrenic that potentially they need medication? Or do you believe medication never? When does someone take a step and the risks of doing so? Okay. So loaded question.

30:17First of all, just to quickly refer to your friend's child who's self-harming, what is the age just very quickly? Teenager. Teenager. Okay. So what we all need is to feel empowered and not to feel that there's something wrong with us. And our current biomedical model will say that you've got a broken brain. And so that creates a sense of hopelessness. We also need to help our children develop psychological immunity. So not just immune system, like our immune system helps, you know, we build our immune system. You build your muscles in resistance training. We've got to build our psychological immunity.

30:48And what we've taken from our children in a lot of our current models is that ability to say it's okay to be a mess. Let's work through this mess together. So a huge part of my work in the book that I've just released is about you as a parent knowing how to manage your own, get your own. They model what they see. They catch it. And model, exactly. And then allowing a child the space. No matter what they say to you, no judgment, no compassion, but saying, listen, I see how you're showing up. I validate. I recognize. Let's work through this together. Here's a system that's scientific that we can work through together.

31:18And the key, Ed, is empowerment. You have to get a person empowered to change their relationship with themself. And when that happens, that's when the growth comes. The cutting, the self-harm, whatever it is, alcohol addiction, whatever it may be, is coming from, yes, the traumas. You can go through all that. I bet you that child probably has had so much therapy that they can tell you why they're doing it to a certain extent. But to get the change in a person's life, it starts with feeling, okay, I am empowered to do this. It's okay to be like this. It's not me. I'm responding to life circumstances.

31:50He has a plan for me to be able to move forward and be empowered to actually re-wise, let my brain and my body do what I know my wise mind wants it to do. So that's a simple answer to that. Medication is a very complex answer, but I'm going to do the easiest, quickest version. Up front, I'm not telling anyone to stop their medication immediately because of the withdrawal. Let's make a quick distinction between drugs and medicine. Medicines are aimed to try and fix a problem like insulin for diabetes. We can test for diabetes. We know there's a biological cause and we've got a drug that's fairly specific to the problem.

32:25When it comes to a child cutting, which is a behavior, depression, perspective of life sucks, battling, all the things that you describe with your friend's child, which is obviously this is very surface what I'm saying. But that cluster of things, that is not a brain disease that's going to be fixed by a drug. That's not coming from something wrong in the brain and a chemical imbalance. It's coming from some cluster of toxic issues and things that that child doesn't know how to process. Self-cutting, for example, is so much pain inside yourself that it's too much inside. So it's easier to transfer the pain to the cutting so that that pain detracts from the internal pain.

33:06And that's an energy that's no energy is lost. It's only transferred. So it's transferred energy. So we must transfer a child's energy into being able to create safe spaces so that they can talk to us as parents, not just the therapist, but us as parents, caregivers, people that they trust. Peers are fantastic for supporting. And that will help them sort of transfer that energy. So a drug is something that like alcohol, cocaine, and psychotropics, they fall under the same category. They're not fixing anything. They're not just storing. They are drugs. and a drug is a psychoactive substance so it changes the state of the brain versus a medicine is trying to fix something so antidepressants aren't fixing chemical imbalance, that's been disproved it's a myth pillars of psychiatry that are used to say that you've got a chemical imbalance etc they're not doing that, what they're doing is they are providing temporary relief so if someone is in such a bad state so for example someone's having very extreme delusions and hallucinations which is not a disease of schizophrenia, it's schizophrenia symptoms.

34:10So instead of saying schizophrenia, bipolar, etc. as a label or diagnosis which is very unscientific and inaccurate and actually does harm, research is shown to the person. It doesn't recognize the enormity of what they're going through. It's rather, let's say, they describe it as behaviors because of something huge in their life and let's look at this whole person. They don't need a disease label and a medication to validate what they're going through. it's valid enough for them to get the support they need. A label and a drug, put it in a little box and make it small, telling them the story, letting them talk, going through that process, gives it the size that it needs, if that makes sense.

34:45So the drug, the way I would recommend drugs is to see them as drugs, not medications. And if someone's in an extreme state, temporarily. Like if you have a headache, you take an ibuprofen to relieve the symptoms. But you don't go on ibuprofen chronically, in other words, every day. That's how we should look at these things. So if someone's in a really bad way, you may. And by the way, she also said in the very beginning that if you're on medication, she's not encouraging you to get off of it. And if people do want to withdraw, I have interviewed top scientists in the world that are drug withdrawal experts.

35:15And they can go and listen to my podcast and they can search through drug withdrawal. And they'll have the top experts with all the resources to guide them through that process. What a remarkable conversation. It just flew by. It did. It did fly by. I'm so excited to have this guest here today. She's one of the most brilliant people you're ever going to meet in your life. She's a bestselling author. She's got a PhD in communication pathology. She's brilliant. And you're going to write a bunch of notes today. I mean, like a bunch of notes. So Dr. Caroline Leaf. Thank you so much for that lovely introduction.

35:43And I just absolutely love talking to you. We had the most amazing talk on when I interviewed you. And I think you're incredible as well. So thank you. What's the difference between brain and mind? And what are these five steps to managing our mind? Maybe you just listed a few of them there, but I like lists. So I'm just wondering what those are. Absolutely. Well, first of all, the five steps we call the neuro, I call it the neuro cycle. So with your mind, you're cycling through your brain, you're directing the neuroplasticity, which is really nice to know. You can actually direct changes in your brain.

36:10So my whole premise is that if you are always, your mind is always working and it's always changing the brain and it's always happening. Can we direct that process? So for three, almost four decades now, I've been researching that. And the answer is yes. And that's what's in the book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. So if you add the neuro cycle to your lifestyle, and it's a lifestyle, you actually will literally improve your ability to manage your mind by 81 % and more, which is phenomenal because it means that you influence cellular health through the telomeres, which we can unpack as well. You can reduce inflammation.

36:46You can improve your immune function, your cardiovascular function, neurological, kidney, everything about your body will respond to mind management because your mind basically is driving all those functions anyway. Your gut health, your gut-brain interaction, all of it isn't happening. If you're dead, your brain and body are dead. So what's the difference between a dead person and an alive person? Mind. So if mind is messy, brain and body are messy. If mind is cleaned up and it's a process because we're all going to be messy because we have free will. And part of getting a mind sorted out, part of mind management is dealing with a mental mess.

37:23It's accepting I'm going to make bad decisions. I'm going to get into arguments. I am going to misunderstand people. I am going to have acute traumas and toxic traumas and imposter syndrome and people pleasing and all this stuff all of us go through in different ways. So I'm going to have that and it's okay. but how am I going to manage it? So for me personally, what's happened over the years is that I still go through these things, but the difference is I'm 81 % more efficient in identifying and managing. So instead of something that could throw me years ago for days and affect my work and everything, I can deal with it within seconds and minutes and get back on track.

38:01So that's one part of the answer. So before I go to mind brain, do you want to ask anything or unpack anything with what i know i are there are there specifically five things like it are going to sequence yes it's a sequence so so before i tell the sequence let me tell you mind brain because it'll make so much more sense because i've said alluded to it a lot so your mind is separate from your brain but inseparable so the what is the brain the brain and mind are not the same thing um and the brain and body collectively are made of 37 to 100 trillion cells and your mind is and then that those 37 to 100 trillion cells arrange themselves into this incredible the brain and the heart and the lungs etc and your mind is what actually is the external force that keeps them going the blood flowing their chemicals electricity electromagnetics all of that which is phenomenal so that's why if our mind's not managed the body and the brain will be a mess and so and that goes down to even like if you are eating if you're eating maybe eating a farm to table, wonderful diet, et cetera, but you're not dealing with your anxiety or you're not, you're trying to stuff it down or you're not dealing with that bad habit or that toxic trauma, you will lose up to 80 % of the nutrition because your mind has affected the ability of the digestive system to actually digest and get the, assimilate the nutrients.

39:17And sometimes it's kind of messy and sometimes it's great. And we all, if we're human, we are going to experience messes and there's no shame in that. The sooner we get rid of the shame and guilt and condemnation around being messy. And the sooner we as leaders talk about the mind more authentically, the more we give people that follow us a permission to talk about mind. Only 3 % of leaders are talking about mind, which is terrible. So that's creating the stigma that they're pretending they'd be perfect. And that's why we see people that seem to be perfect in their lives and they're committing suicide.

39:49Meanwhile, it's because we've got this philosophy in this day and age of not being open and seeing issues of the mind as helpful messengers of an underlying issue. The neuro cycle then is this five step. It is how you manage your mind moment by moment. So it's a lifestyle. So the neuro cycle is what you do when you're awake and conscious. And it then automatically prepares you for sleep because sleep is fixing up your brain. So your mind is always with you. So your mind always needs to be managed. And so an analogy, and then I'll dive into the five steps. You can go three weeks without food. You can go three days without water.

40:25You can go three minutes without oxygen, but you don't even go three seconds without using your mind. So you're always thinking, feeling, and choosing. Yeah. So it's gather awareness. Second step is to reflect. Third step is to write. Fourth step is to recheck. And the fifth step is an active reach. So each of those, they're so profound. They do the most phenomenal stuff in your brain. And the first half of the book, where I talk about the mental health system and I talk about my clinical trials, I do explain what each of those steps are doing. So the first thing is to gather awareness. Gather awareness, and I've chosen words very carefully.

41:01If you think of a big fat apple tree and you're apple picking, and this apple tree is so full that you actually can't, like you just go up and you just nudge it and the apples are just falling on your head. That's how we often feel when our mind's a mess. Everything's just falling on our head and it's just too much. So what you can do with a neurocycle is when you feel that situation coming on, remove yourself from the tree and stand back and watch the tree and gather awareness of all of that. Don't be scared of it. Don't run away from the apple tree. Just stand back and observe the apple tree.

41:31Observe what's going on there. Let me jump in about that. This is brilliant. One of the things I've taught for a long time, I didn't understand the neuroscience behind it was that for me, and there's four other steps, this is why everybody needs to get the book, but awareness of your thoughts. I've always said, when I'm aware of these patterns, when I'm aware of my thoughts, they begin to lose their power over me, their influence over me. And one of the reasons that you're explaining it scientifically, which I've always wanted to understand better, because I do become separate from the thought when I observe it, almost like I'm above it and distant from it, like you said.

42:01And I realize I'm not just that thought and that is a pattern that I'm running. And so I just want to acknowledge what Caroline's saying, because from a practical standpoint, when I coach people, this is something that is the first thing I teach is just becoming aware. Now to know that there's four other steps is obviously very empowering as well, but I want to just unpack this a little bit into another area. So I want to use your brilliance towards something else. One thing I want to acknowledge is that what Caroline is saying is that neuroplasticity is real, that mind can change matter, that literally that these thoughts, if you change them, change the protein structures in your brain, change the matter of your brain.

42:39So this is powerful to know that we can physically change our brain by using our mind. And this distinction between the mind and the brain is also a breakthrough way of listening to it or seeing it for me, as I'm sure it is for everybody else. Just those things alone, just those two things alone have made our time already incredibly invaluable for me and anybody listening to it. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice. Progressive loves to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called Auto Quote Explorer that allows you to compare your Progressive car insurance quote with rates from other companies.

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44:38That was a great conversation. And if you want to hear the full interview, be sure to follow the Ed Milet show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. You'll never miss an episode that way. I'm so excited to have this lady here with me. I'm fascinated by her work and because the applications in so many different areas of my own life. And I believe for the audience today, she's got a new book out called Peak Mind. She's a neuroscientist, professor of psychology at University of Miami, and I already like her. Amishi Jha, welcome to the program. Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

45:10I think also that if you've had some success, too, that if it doesn't come with a dose of humility, that when you begin to walk into every room and every environment and think you've already figured it out, you already know, this stunts growth as well because what you're saying is it blunts you taking in new data and new information. Correct. Correct. You get it. You totally get it. you are denying yourself better data more data to inform the decisions that happen so don't do that don't do that to yourself right give us the exercise we've been building enough give us yeah okay so this is like this i'm going to give you a longer one just to describe the steps and then we'll do like one that you can do anytime all the time okay so this is like a basic mindfulness practice and i call it again tied to what we're talking about in the in the book and attention the find your find your flashlight practice great because oftentimes it's not that we don't um we can't focus is that we don't know where we're focusing at any moment.

46:01That's true. So the instruction would be, and I guide people to kind of ramp up to about 12 minutes a day that our data suggests is beneficial to do this, but to start out, like do 30 seconds of this, commit to that for a few weeks and see how that goes. So the practice is essentially find a quiet, comfortable spot and take this time seriously, even if it's 30 seconds or a minute, sit in an upright, alert posture, like a dignified, you know, if we do it now, it's just like upright, alert, dignified. And first step is just acknowledge, notice, shine the floodlight on your experience that you're breathing right now.

46:37Then what you're going to do is hone in on something that actually you notice is prominent in your experience of breathing. So do you notice anything that feels prominent, like the coolness of air maybe by your nose or maybe your chest? It's actually the sound I'm making okay great yeah the the sound that's a great one too that's where you're gonna hold the point the flashlight that's your attentional target for this short practice so direct that flashlight right there keep it steady you can close your eyes if you want to whatever you choose just to limit the sensory input and if it hasn't happened yet it surely will your mind will wander and all you do in that moment is notice it ah the mind has wandered away next step take that flashlight redirect it back to that same attentional target and repeat so it's essentially focus point that flashlight notice use the floodlight redirect get the juggler to do its job oh my goodness Yes.

47:49You know, can I ask about that? Yeah, please. When I first started this, there was like a judgment when I drift away. Oh, no, it's a total win. It's a win moment. It's actually a win because it gives us a chance to redirect the flashlight, right? This is so important because I used to, I don't know, maybe you're further along than me, but in the beginning I was like, gosh, man, I'm gone this for like 24 seconds and I'm out. But you're actually saying that's actually a gift when we drift away because it allows us to build this flashlight, I'll call it a muscle, so to speak. that we're coming back.

48:20That's really good. Now I hope it makes sense why I wanted to describe those three systems because we hit all three in this. It does. And I think it's really important to not think of the wandering as a problem. The wandering, remember we started out talking about 50 % of the time, it's the nature of the mind. I didn't say, Ed, if you happen to be one of those weird people with mind wanders, like us normal people don't have that, you have mind wandering. I didn't say that. I said, when your mind wanders, because it's going to wander for sure. Just bring it back. And not doing that with the added story, the added reactivity is so important.

48:52You know, I was just thinking of the, I did a lot of work when I was younger and I do now with kids. And I have so many parents almost judge their children for their, he can't stay focused in the classroom. He drifts away. And I'm just thinking right now, like what a breakthrough this might be for some parents who are listening to this to realize that that's actually, everyone is at 50%. Maybe your kid reveals it more than other kids do. Doesn't conceal it as well. Right. Maybe it manifests in talking out loud as opposed to scribbling on a sheet of paper so it's more apparent. But this is something that even with, do you believe, is there a particular age where you believe a child might be able to begin to build this, I'm calling it building a muscle because everybody can relate to that.

49:31Yeah, no, I think it is. It's practice, it's strengthening. So the first thing to say is that this brain system of attention is one of the slowest to develop. We don't fully develop this capacity until we're about 25. Okay. And one of the reasons is it relies on the frontal lobes, which are the slowest brain region to develop. So, you know, it does kind of drive me nuts sometimes. And I feel for parents when they're not happy that their children aren't paying attention or their response is pay attention. It's not going to help at all. And in fact, understanding that that's the thing that is your child is not not paying attention because they don't know that they should often.

50:09It's that they don't know where their attention is. just like we are saying we don't know. Wow, that's good, that's good. So I think that the thing to really, and by the way, yes, absolutely, there's a huge enterprise of offering mindfulness training in a developmentally appropriate manner to children as young as preschool. Really? We can do these in very useful ways for children, but what you're having them cultivate is not just focus, focus, focus. It's where are you right now? Where are you? In a friendly, self-supportive way. And is that where you want to be right now? You know, when you talk to yourself in that manner of like, where am I right now?

50:44Is that where I want to be? All of a sudden, the world doesn't feel as dire. Like, oh, I'm over here. I think I want to be over there instead. I think that's what I should be doing right now is being over there. It's a different relationship. And if you, the younger that we can get people to start understanding that this is befriending your mind in a way that allows it to be used to your benefit. That's fascinating to me. Punitive to yourself. Yeah, that, um, I'm just thinking I'm sitting here as a 50 year old man. I've done different forms of meditation mindfulness I'm relatively productive human being and I'm confessing to the audience that oftentimes I'm going 24 seconds and I'm out of my attention where well my attention has changed rather so the idea that we're concerned about our eight-year-old who might have the exact same or does have the exact same scenario that I do I'm just curious has there been any data are kids even more than 50 percent where their attention moves or would you assume that because those frontal lobes aren't as developed or is it pretty much the same here's the tricky part of having assessing that with children by the way what does it take for you to even know if somebody's on task or off task right they have to have the awareness yeah in something it's something called meta awareness awareness or attention to your attention that is also a developmentally slow process so we're getting a fuzzy read on them I mean we could take them into the lab and look directly at their performance on tasks and yeah they mind wander a lot their attention can be off often, you know, off task often, but I don't think that's the thing we want to help cultivate, which is the counterintuitive thing.

52:10And I mean, I refer to it in the book is like a peak mind pivot. It's like, we think that we have to focus better. We think we need to focus on, we need to train ourselves to focus. And I'm saying, no, to focus better, train your mind to notice when you're not focused. Gosh, very good. So, you know, that's a totally different set of You're exercising the floodlight and the juggler. The flashlight will do its thing. It knows how to do its thing. But really pay attention to the understanding of where your mind is moment by moment. I did that during your TED Talk. You actually say something similar during your TED Talk.

52:44And then I thought, well, where am I now? Yeah. And then I'm back with you. And then where am I now? And then I came back with you. And that's it. You know, 24 seconds. If you're truly going 24 seconds, you are, we got to bring you to the lab because that's really good. I made the number up. It's probably more like 2.4 seconds. I don't know. I actually asked a colleague of mine who'd been practicing mindfulness for 30 years. Because I was getting, in the initial stages when I was just trying to understand what this thing is, I was like, I'm not going very long before my mind wanders. And will that be the thing that will extend as I practice more?

53:14That was my thinking. That's a reasonable hypothesis. If it's five seconds now, maybe it'll be 10 and 15. Each year, I might get longer before it wandering. And I was very humbled by what he said. He said, 30 years of practice. He said, seven seconds. No kidding. And but, you know, so at first I'm like, oh, great. What am I being bothering? Like, it's still gonna be seven seconds after 30 years. But what he said next really helped. He said, you know, what has happened is that my mind now, instead of being completely lost in a fantasy or a doomsday scenario. And I love that it was like almost poetic.

53:50He's like, it's like I'm seeing the ripples, you know, the ripples at the distance of the placid lake. And I was like, oh, he really knows his mind. Like he can tell a slight tug. He doesn't have to go full on into, you know, next vacation has been planned while you're trying to do five minutes of a mindfulness practice. That felt so much more like he knows his mind. He knows where it is with that level of granularity. Yeah. And in some sense, this is the part that I think is also really interesting, especially as we talk about athletes and military service members and special operators, etc. It's this sense that you develop because you know your mind a sense of, I'm going to use the term, mental toughness.

54:35It's like I know the space. I know the lake. It may not always be placid. It's usually for me like a rough, stormy place. Right. But I can take anything. Like my mind is here for it. And frankly, that's developing that same floodlight capacity. I am here. I'm present for it. I'm not going to be thrown off. I'm steady in the middle of whatever's going on. Very good. You know, I think some of the most self-confident people I know are just more self-aware. And I think that's actually what you're describing. There's an awareness of self. I'm loving this and I want to keep going. So I want to ask you about, you've described things in visual terminology a lot.

55:12and I'd like to think that I am a visual person also, although I don't know that there's such a thing. I'm wondering if part of that self-awareness is, are some people more predisposed to be kinesthetic or auditory or visual in the deductions they make, in the observations that they make? And is that something to be cognizant of about yourself when you're in a state of attention that you are not just... I feel like I'm very visual, but maybe every single person is. or are there more auditory, predisposed people, kinesthetic, visual? I mean, the jury is out. Most people say now that the notion of learning styles or specific modalities is not all that well supported.

55:53So I would say we don't know yet if that's actually the case. But frankly, the bulk of the brain as human beings compared to our little dogs that run around, so dominant with vision. But you brought up something that I want to actually, I want to kind of ping that. Because that, what you described, is not what I'm talking about when I use the term meta-awareness. What you just described, very powerful thing to do, is something we call metacognition. So both of these are tied to self-awareness, but meta-awareness is a different thing. So metacognition is essentially knowing your tendencies, knowing your styles, knowing your decision-making capacities, your strengths, your weaknesses.

56:29I mean, everything you just described would be really great to know for your metacognitive style, for example. And yes, it can definitely there could be differences maybe not tactile or visual but there are definitely differences in the way people operate metacognitively so you may be a maximizer in your decision-making versus a satisfier you know there's these different orientations but I'm not talking about that what I'm talking about when I talk about the floodlight because remember the floodlight system is really about the now and meta awareness is awareness of the moment-to-moment processes and contents within your mind.

57:04So it doesn't really matter from the meta-awareness point of view what your tendencies are. What is going on right now? Where is your mind right now? And I think that that what's important now kind of orientation is so important in performance context. Yeah. Because it doesn't matter what you're doing. I'm like, what's going on now? Is it always important to be in the now? In other words, is it bad to be dreaming in the future? Is it bad or good? I don't even like that terminology. But useful. Yeah. Yeah. Is it useful? That's a great question. Yeah I'm so glad you asked me that because I don't want it to seem like I'm saying always be here right now Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, that's not what I'm saying In fact this capacity to mentally time travel to just like you did with your what did you have for dinner last night?

57:46Right is so useful for us In fact, it may be the thing that defines us in our evolutionary advantage as human beings, right? We can displace ourselves in something called time travel. We can rewind the mind. We can fast forward the mind. You heard about me talking about that a little bit in the TED Talk. But it's not just about time traveling. It's also about mind traveling. Okay. What does that mean? Mind traveling is essentially putting yourself in the shoes and mind of somebody else. So both of those are really, really powerful things to do. When we talk about mindfulness, it's a solution to a vulnerability in our capacity to do both of those things.

58:25So the problem with time travel, though it's extremely useful for productively reflecting or planning, it becomes problematic under certain states. And I do think of the athletes, like my heart goes out to them oftentimes when I see mess-ups, right? Like you did something, you totally messed up, and it happens. You glitched. if you can't stop rewinding the mind, you are no way going to be able to succeed in the next moment. So how do you get yourself to not rewind? Very good. Right? So, or... Let me see, that's really good. Yeah. And I think that the other part is you may be, you know, not necessarily the athletic setting, but in our, like even during COVID, like if you can't stop catastrophizing and worrying about the future...

59:10You got it. You're stuck. You're going to be, probably have a lot of anxiety. So the reason we want to, and frankly, the same thing goes with mind traveling. If I'm constantly preoccupied about your view of me, social anxiety is going to set in. So the reason mindfulness became such an important solution for me, going back to why we study in my lab, is because each of those things, ruminating about the past, catastrophizing about the others, overly caring about the viewpoints and evaluation on yourself, hijack attention. It depletes attention. Gosh, that's so good. You're describing from a scientific standpoint all the things that people listening to this go, I know this is true.

59:49And I think the rewinding thing, man, it's just huge. So many people are in the rewind and just beating themselves up and repeating the same story over and over again. But the other thing that I've figured out is that oftentimes stress is time travel in the future. Meaning that it's not so much the speech you have to give or the sale you have to close or the putt you have to hit that is stressing you out. It's you projecting into the future the negative result of it and then on top of that what other people are going to think or say about you When you miss the putt when you don't close the sale exactly is that not true?

1:00:22Exactly you described both the mind travel and the time travel right? That's those are the those are what I would really call the kryptonite scenarios like you're really What all of that is doing is attention still being used and you're draining it out You're draining the fuel in spinning in those directions. So how do you you know? It's easy to say well don't do that get back to here and now it's easy to say it It's very hard to do because the tendencies are so strong So you got to train for it just like anything else that's hard to do you were gonna give us one other I think you're gonna give us one other one another training.

1:00:52By the way, let's get peak mind Let's get the book so that we also the whole thing. That's the whole idea But one more of them would be I'm driving in my car and I'm like I wanted to get me one more The car is a perfect example. You didn't even know I was gonna go there Okay, this other practice is just called the stop practice literally s-t-o-p and do it while you're driving okay do it while you're walking do it at any time you want stop is stop like whatever the progression of your life is in that moment halt it take a breath and that's this conscious breath aware that you're doing it

1:01:27observe, O, proceed, B. so it's just it's a mini mindfulness practice and i really think it's useful because you know where your flashlight is at the end of it i know it's right here right now i'm back so use stop signs use red lights to remind yourself to do that over and over again so good i'm just thinking of something when you asked me to do that i actually did it with you and i actually noticed a couple things in my visual space that have been here the entire time that I didn't see. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. And we're going a little bit deeper probably than I should, but I, there's a lot of things that your brain does on habit mode, correct?

1:02:06Like if I'm driving to work and I take the same off ramp every single day, I think my brain is storing energy by doing something that's habitual. That's how I've always understood it anyways, that I'm taking that same off ramp, whether I'm right or wrong, it doesn't matter. The point that I want to make about that is that for me, I think for most people being present is even though yes, there's a benefit to being in the future and rewinding. There's a benefit to being reflective and reminiscing in the past and gaining wisdom from it. But for most of us, that's not a struggle for most people. The struggle for most people is being present.

1:02:37And that's why this is so important what you're teaching here. And for me, there's so many things in a given day that mindfulness practices make me just aware of being present that I'm curious as to in practical application, how much time a day i know there's no formula but if you were just saying hey ed i'd recommend to you it's 10 minutes a day it's five different times a day it's once a day do it the same time of the day doesn't matter when you do it what would your advice be on just building this practice as the habit aspect yeah well i mean the last line of the the title is invest 12 minutes a day so that gives you a sense of and that number comes out of many studies that have suggested you know if you get to that mount we tend to see benefits and the more you do from that the more you benefit but if you don't quite get to that it's almost like is is going for a walk in my neighborhood walking my dog going to build my physical fitness probably not it's not going to be bad for you but you're not going to get to that level so here's the answer to the question of the so the when would be and you can get a deeper understanding of why i say 12 minutes if you read more about it but just know that it comes from a lot i did i just want them a lot of research i know i know but I'm just saying, but your question regarding when to do it and the habit issue is the best time to do it is when you're going to do it.

1:03:53And that's kind of maybe a cop out, but literally the key to anything. And you'd probably say the same thing regarding physical excellence. Right. The key is advantaging your capacity to create it and incorporate it into daily routine. Yeah. And so what I suggest for people, like I just said with what we were doing, the short practice, if you think you can do three minutes, set the goal of a minute and a half and get the win of I did it I did it I did it and yoke it to something that you already do you know my recommendation is is something that you know you're going to do every day without exception maybe right after you brush your teeth in the morning or maybe right before you have your cup of coffee sometime that you know you're going to do it and what I would suggest just to play around with when that works for you is to try it at different times of the day what what many people say when we say try the morning you know just play around with the time of day is like people say things like, I love the taste of my coffee so much more.

1:04:46It's like, I've actually tasted it. Gosh, it's so true. I can't, you know, so, and why are you depriving yourself of that? Right. Why are we rushing through? I mean, you're going to have the coffee anyway. Why not have a little bit more pleasure with that experience? I have to just say though, I was going to tell you off camera, but I'm so glad you said this because I forgot, which is that I just want to give everybody the gift of this, that by the way, I'm nowhere near where you would be or other people. I don't think there's rankings either, by the way. It's not a judgment thing. But my sensory experiences, just in general, have been so dramatically increased by this practice.

1:05:21And people always say to me that there's this duality. Maybe one of the reasons they would like me is that maybe I'm sort of like a masculine dude, but I'm very emotional and very sensitive. I don't know that I've always been that way, but I do find that I experience my emotions on a deeper level over the last decade or so that my laughter is a little deeper and more joyous. The taste of food is a little bit more pleasurable. My, my acknowledgement and noticing beauty around me and the nuances and specificities of it, and not just the visual, but smells and wind hitting my face. I know this sounds ridiculous to some people.

1:05:56It's just richer because of this practice, never mind being far more present and productive. And I think also for me, peak is such a word that I've used over and over. When I'm fully present, it appears to me that I've got better access to my vocabulary, better access to insights in reading somebody. Do you, similar experience for you? I mean, for sure. And it can be lifesaving in many ways. And actually, you know, you described the plus side. And I think it's so great. It's almost like, you mean I can just have more joy by being here more? Yeah, you can. But there's another part that I think is very important in the context of our action and our humanity.

1:06:37We're also more present to the suffering of other people. We're also more connected to other people. We also have more sense and respect for the humanity of others around us and for the environment. And I think that at this particular point, kind of in our human history, consciousness, we need to be more aware of what is the heck is going on. We have very little time to like try to make things better for our planet, for example. And also with all the injustices happening. And, you know, I was talking recently to somebody regarding this notion of burnout. And, you know, so many people are feeling so burnt out.

1:07:11Can mindfulness help with burnout? And the answer is yes, mindfulness can help with burnout. But, you know, actually in the context of a conference I was at with critical care nurses. Now, we know over COVID that has been a group that has been very, very crunched, right? And the question was, can mindfulness help me with burnout? And I said, yes. And they said, but then the system that the organization of the scheduling is the reason I feel burnt out. And I was like, yes, but there's no way you're going to demand change or even conceptualize how to create change if you don't have the capacity to see what's going on.

1:07:43Yes. So just, you know, use that as the next step to give back to those who may not have this capacity yet. It's like as the more present we are, the more we can enact change and empower other people to do the same. It's so you're so right. And I know, you know, you're right. But people have told me that the last 10 years or so I'm just using practical experience for me. You're more patient than you used to be. That's sort of more like the symptom almost that it's it is more what you have described, which is that I try to be present with people and see them and hear them and experience them more than fix them like I used to.

1:08:21And try to truly empathize and understand their experience and their reality. And I've always felt since I started this, like I wish more of, I don't care what political party you're part of, I wish more political people had that ability for empathy and understanding and just stopped and listened to people and didn't assess it all the time. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that I attribute some, if not most of that to these practices. Because obviously I'm a performer, peak performer, expert person supposedly, but it's the other benefits of doing this that have enriched my life far more than the fact that I've made more money because I'm more present with people or these other things.

1:09:05I'm actually curious about this. What about memory? So is it that my memory can be improved because of this, because I was actually present in more moments. So I have better recall because I, my attention was where I was more often, or is it that there's something happening in my brain where I'm developing the ability to recall and remember things better? Pretty good question, huh? Yes. Yeah. Right. So I'm, cause is it, cause you can say, well, yeah, your memory's better. Well, well, maybe that's just because I was more present. Or is there actually something operating in my brain where I'm, there's a new myelin forming in my brain.

1:09:42I don't know. I'm just, well, first of all, everything, this conversation is changing your brain. I mean, I don't just mean, cause it's some kind of massively transformative thing. Every experience, well, every experience we have impacts the way our brain functions. So there's no like, there's no divide between experience and brain changes. They're just happening concurrently. Right. So yes, it is the case. So you're such a great intuition about neuroscience. It's awesome. Thank you. So yes, it is the case that the more we can get, the more attentive we are, the more granular, fine-grained the inputs are for our memory.

1:10:17In fact, attention is the gateway for memory. If you don't pay attention, there's no way that you're going to have the experience of encoding episodes in your life, gaining new information. Now, there are aspects of our memory that are outside the scope of something you need attention for after it's well-learned. So for example, if I tell you, tell me across the board of a keyboard what the letters are, I mean, I could tell you, but if you give me a keyboard, I can type it. So that's an example of something we call procedural memory, which is you actually don't need your attention for that. But for episodes and knowledge, you need attention to input the information.

1:10:52You also need your attention to pull it out. So remember we were talking about the flashlight and your dinner meal? You have to have clarity of directing it to call up the right thing. So it is on both ends of that. And frankly, there's another thing to think about, which is that, what did you call it, myelin? So yes, it ends up that long-term memory is a structural change within the brain. It actually becomes like fixed hard in terms of neural connections that occur. That process is helped by having clarity of mind. And actually just kind of to really tie the loose ends of this conversation together, current models suggest maybe that's where all this mind wandering is actually happening.

1:11:33It may be a memory encoding process. The reason the brain pumps out thoughts isn't because it's just trying to mess with us. It's because that's the way episodic memory encoding happens. It's a replay button that just happens by default. And as it keeps replaying, things kind of harden into long-term memory. Oh, this is so good. All right. First of all, I want everybody to get Peak Mind. I want them to get your book. The reason that I want them to get the book is because I think the application of what you're teaching is different for many different people. And I love things that have broad application.

1:12:05So I think if you're an athlete, you want to read this book. I think if you're someone who wants to find a little bit more bliss in your life and be more present, I think this is a book that you should have. And I think just having an overall understanding of one's self is why I think this work is so fascinating. And it's why my audience knows I love every interview that I do. I don't talk to people that I don't want to share with the world, but there are certain topics that just fascinate me because I like to understand why some of the things I teach work. I understand some of it. And you're helping me so much with that.

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1:13:11Mutine. Adjective. Used to describe an individual whose spirit is unyielding, unconstrained. One who navigates life on their own terms, effortlessly. They do not always show up on time, but when they arrive, you notice an individual confident in their contradictions. They know the rules, but behave as if they do not exist. Muteen, the new fragrance by Miu Miu, defined by you. Very short intermission here, folks. I'm glad you're enjoying the show so far. Don't forget to follow the show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. Now on to our next guest. I have a real friend here today and somebody that I admire tremendously.

1:13:53He's helped me. He scanned my brain. I think he's the foremost expert on brain health on the planet. He's a great friend of mine. I love him very much. He's a strong man of faith as well. Dr. Daniel Amon, welcome back to the show, brother. Thank you so much. What about physical activity as it affects brain health? This is a gamer, phone, et cetera. So combination question, physical activity. and I've asked you two two-parters today because I just think they're somewhat connected. And is there an age you think some child should not be on social media? As long as possible. If you had kids again right now, would your 10-year-old be on social or no?

1:14:33No. No, not 10? No, because why? Apple and Facebook and TikTok, they work with neuroscientists to keep you there longer. Their goal is mind share. And that's not okay because they're stealing the minds of this generation. I mean, on average, people are spending three and a half, four hours on social media. Just imagine what you could do with that time. So put screens off as long as humanly you can and get them to exercise. But it's coordination exercises. Remember we talked about the cerebellum? It's tennis and table tennis and pickleball and racquetball. Those are really great for brain development because the cerebellum, I'm getting old and people don't remember Rodney Dangerfield.

1:15:37I sure do. So horrifying for me. I get no respect. The cerebellum is the Rodney Dangerfield part of the brain. 10 % of the brain's volume, but has half of the brain's neurons. And when you do coordination exercises, you're developing that very important part of your brain. And yeah, I'm not a fan of hitting soccer balls with your head. You said that multiple times. Or letting kids play tackle football. I did the big NFL study. When the NFL was sort of lying, they had a problem with traumatic brain injury in football. and now everybody knows it's true, why would you put a developing brain in a position to have damage?

1:16:24Think about that. Your brain, and most people don't know this, but your brain is not finished developing until you're 25. So there's this process called myelinization. So your neurons, your brain cells, get wrapped with a white fatty substance called myelin, sort of like insulation on a copper wire. And once they're myelinated, they work 10 to 100 times faster. So this is where maturity happens, myelination. Well, it starts in the back when you're two months old, right? Babies can see, and when you smile at them, they smile back. Your prefrontal cortex, largest in humans than any other animal by far, focus, forethought, judgment, impulse control, organization, planning, empathy, learning from the mistakes you make, it's not finished developing until you're 25, which is why I'm not a fan of sending kids away to college and have them join sororities and fraternities with other underdeveloped brains.

1:17:25It's just a prescription for a lot of trauma and bad things to happen. I got my hair cut this morning and it's a young lady that cuts my hair and she's always asking me for advice, you know, on life. And I said, well, I said, you know, you'll see these videos on social media. Often when you ask somebody towards the end of their life, they'll say, what are your regrets? And it's not typically, I wish I'd have worked more. It's typically, I wish I'd have been more present with my family. I wish I'd have traveled more. I wish I had more memories. And I told her, and I wish I'd have taken more risks and pursued my dreams.

1:18:00I wish I wouldn't have played it so safe in my life. And it made an impact on her. And I I watched her kind of drift into her thoughts. And she says, you know, Ed, I think my generation at the end of their life, when we get there, they're going to say their biggest regret is they wish they spent less time on their phones. They wish they spent less time on social media, that they wasted their lives away in these digital devices and they weren't present in the real world. And I told her, I said, I think you're 100 % right. She goes, I know 30 years from now, we'll be watching my generation say this.

1:18:30And so your point is so incredibly profound. All right. This is, as usual, my conversations with you. I want to go 11 hours with you. My guest today is Dr. Andrew Huberman, and he's a neuroscientist. His lab is at Stanford. Today's going to be one of the more interesting shows for me that we've ever done before, because I'm fascinated with this man's work. There's a general societal belief about certain things. So if that's true, but I've also heard you say your thoughts are a choice. So if it's this involuntary process that's happening where we've all sort of agreed to this and we're almost pre-programmed through a series of evolution to believe certain things.

1:19:09How is it also that we choose our thoughts? Great question. It's the question that neuroscientists think about. And just as a bit of a disclaimer, there's going to be a little bit abstract, but I promise to get concrete and I'll do my best to be as succinct as possible. Succinctness is not the quality that's typically associated with academics. What I will promise, however, is I'll try and use as few acronyms as possible. And I'll only name things if I think it's going to be important for people to go look up more as opposed to just raining terminology down on people because that's not useful.

1:19:44So, you're absolutely right. The nervous system is responsible for sensation, perception, feelings, thoughts, actions, and memories. All of that. Let's talk about what's non-negotiable. What's non-negotiable are the sensations. I have receptors in my eye. You have receptors in your eye. We have receptors in our skin, in our tongue, in our ears, et cetera, that take physical events in the universe, of which there are many, and can only sense some of those. So, for instance, I'm not a pit viper. I can't see in the infrared. A pit viper can. I can see in the infrared if I snap on infrared goggles.

1:20:28But if I don't do that, my eye can't sense those. So I can't sense magnetic fields. There are people that claim that they can sense magnetic fields. If they can, it's an unusual quality. It hasn't been shown very robustly in the lab. Turtles, on the other hand, navigate extremely long distances by virtue of magnetic fields. They are magneto-sensing organisms. So the things that we can pull out of the universe and into our nervous system to work with, those are fixed entities. Now, a colorblind person, one in 80 males is red, green, colorblind. They can't see red as the way you and I can. My dog is red, green, colorblind.

1:21:05So there are some unusual cases. But in the absence of any technology, the sensations that we can detect are fixed. They are non-negotiable as much as gravity is non-negotiable. We have to develop technologies to overcome them if we want to see into the infrared or see ultraviolet light, et cetera. Okay. Now, perceptions, feelings, thoughts. Those are where it gets negotiable. Because, for instance, I can decide that the color of your shirt has meaning to me, like we're both wearing a black shirt, and therefore, we must have met in a previous lifetime. And pretty soon, I'd start to sound like a crazy person.

1:21:42Because the definition of psychosis or crazy is assigning meaning to something for which there's none, right? So we have to agree as groups of individuals and societally what sorts of meanings matter. And that's where it gets very subjective. We place value on the fact that somebody who commits a crime before the age 18 versus after 18, we call them an adult. But developmental trajectories are from birth to death. There isn't some cliff that, you know, biological event. So we could go really deep down this rabbit hole. or not. But what we know is that sensations are non-negotiable. What we know is that societies and the way that we function as families and couples and in the workplace, they obey certain principles or rules of engagement that on average are adaptive for a given culture.

1:22:38So, we meet, we say hello. We agree on these cultural things that because on average, they're adaptive. Whereas if we met and we decided first, we were going to fight. First of all, we both know you're going to win that. We're going to physically fight. And second of all, it's just not adaptive for the evolution of cultures, most cultures. There are circumstances where that's appropriate. So what's important for us to understand is that the human brain is very, very good at all these things, sensation, perception, feeling, thought, and action. it's also very good at two other things. One is interoception, paying attention to what's going on inside me and exteroception, paying attention to what's going on in the outside world and balancing the weight of one or the other in order to move adaptively through life.

1:23:28Now, and I'll just throw this out as one more kind of conceptual thing, but as I promised, I would make it more concrete as opposed to abstract. When we say it's adaptive, what we mean is that this neural machinery in our heads literally i've opened up a lot of skulls i've held a lot of brains in my life i teach neuroanatomy to medical students now for 10 years i promise you it's just meat in there meat and some fluid and so the neurons of the brain take sensations and the only thing neurons can do the only language they can speak is to be electrically active at certain times and in certain sequences, like the keys on a piano.

1:24:05And it's this amazing thing. Like it still inspires wonder in me when I think about it, that you do this, I do this, and we agree on some common rules of engagement that are adaptive. And it's what led us out of caves, hunter-gatherer cultures, technologies, the car, the plane, the iPhone. It's amazing. and we are I think the important thing to remember is that we are still in our evolution as a species we are still trying to work out whether or not 10 hours a day with the smartphone is good or bad for us we're still trying to figure out whether or not traveling to other planets is good or bad for us what should we do about this COVID thing we're still trying to work this out and the language that we do to work that out is neural language yes and so I apologize if I made things more abstract than before, but you didn't, we just have to agree on some rules of a game.

1:25:00Just like if we're going to play chess, we need to set up some constraints. And so those are the constraints in broad terms. How do those so good. So no, it's perfect because I want to now, I want to move it into like where we are in culture and also performance, just what you just said. And so I know what I teach, but I don't know that I always know why it works the way it does. So these, this nervous system, I'd like you to speak to, maybe it makes no impact, I have an assumption that it does, previous experience in life, and does the importance of something in one's life change one's sensory acuity to it?

1:25:33So what I mean by that is, there's this great debate right now about racial and social issues. And so I wonder, I've wondered if someone has not had an experience with something, that they literally perceive sensory-wise less of it. And if they've got a history of some sort of a situation with a racial issue or sexual abuse or something like that, that they see or feel more of it because it's important to them. And perhaps that's why there are certain things in society we can't come to a consensus on because importance in previous experience may change the way in which we gather this information.

1:26:12And on the other flip side of that, is that also then true to program yourself to win, that when something is important enough to you, you begin to see, feel, and hear things that will lead you towards those particular goals that you wouldn't see if it wasn't important in terms of your sensory acuity or your nervous system picking up on it, or are they not correlated in any way? Can you speak to both of those? Sure. Again, a great set of questions. So, a moment ago, I mentioned that, you know, we have this interoception, which is really just paying attention to what's going on internally. Like, I could stop now and think about how my stomach feels or my breathing or you know really go internal or I can be externally focused and that's what the nervous system is doing the nervous system has some very basic jobs it's it wants to so it learns things we're born into this world and the organization of the nervous system when we come into this world is not a completely blank slate it's designed to learn it's a learning machine the brain is amazing because it's the only organ that wires up itself which is incredible yeah so it's a self-learning self-building machine and for the early part of life the goal of the brain is twofold one is to maintain all the housekeeping stuff keep the heart beating keep digestion going keep breathing going at a minimum to keep the organism alive to keep us alive and then it wants to learn things that are specific to its environment and learn the rules of these sensations.

1:27:44Objects fall down, not up, right? Mom walks in the room, she leaves the room, she comes back on average or doesn't or on, you know, learning these rules, contingencies, and then passing those off to reflexive parts of the nervous system. So just like a baby never has to think about taking a breath or governing its heartbeat with conscious thought the nervous system wants to learn things and then push that to reflexive action it's a lot of work to be do what's called serial processing yes not serial like me but like serial as in series i know you know this but just for those you know maybe second language english second language or something so serial processing is hard for the nervous system it's about thinking if a then b then b then c oh wait was it c yes a b then c it's it's work and it requires areas of the brain that are very metabolically costly to engage.

1:28:38It's why thinking hard kind of hurts. There's some strain associated with it. So the more we experience something, the more our reactions to it are going to become reflexive for better or for worse. If it's a bad event, the nervous system or it creates a sensation that's uncomfortable, the nervous system will create an association whereby we naturally start to avoid that thing, whether or not it's good for us or bad for us. If it's something that we like, we get rewarded and we want with a chemical, typically dopamine or serotonin, and we want to move toward that thing again. And that illustrates the other key feature of the nervous system that I think will help simplify some of this kind of overwhelming number of things that the brain can do and how it can do it, which is we have in our brain a few chemical systems that are called neuromodulators.

1:29:26they're not responsible for the communication between neurons what they do is they modulate or change the likelihood that certain brain circuits will engage and other ones won't and they fall into very specific categories the most famous of these is the neuromodulator dopamine dopamine is is released anytime we experience something we really really like but under very specific conditions anytime we are moving towards something and we think we're on the right path dopamine is released and this is nature's way of telling whatever neurons are active during that movement down that path so this could be exercise it could be a relationship breakthrough it could be a business breakthrough it could be learning some little piece of a puzzle that you're excited to learn you've been straining on it tells you more of that more of those neural symphonies or neurons being active in the way they just were whatever you were doing just there more of that so it sends you down this path and dopamine is very misunderstood people think dopamine is about getting the reward dopamine is about sending you toward the reward think of it like a jet propulsion system well right it's not that just the finish line it's a jet propulsion system and every animal needed that an animal that's gonna jump on you i'm gonna give it back to you i just gotta say something i think it's one of the most significant things ever said on the show honestly, and it explains my own life experience or my relationships.

1:30:52I want you to hear what he just said, everybody, that you're getting more dopamine on average in the pursuit of your dream and your goal than you actually do with the attainment of it. And that maybe there's a little key here to if dopamine is sort of a happiness drug, right? If you want to call it that, could it not possibly be true that one of the keys of happiness in life is the pursuit of something great, the pursuit of growth. And that that's the key, that you don't have to achieve everything in order to give yourself the gift of happiness. I didn't mean to interrupt you, that's so freaking significant.

1:31:29Because I think a lot of people sort of cheat themselves from just the pursuit. Because they think, well, I'll only be happy when I get there. I'm not qualified. I haven't read enough. I don't know enough people. I don't have enough context. And they stand still, and they're not happy. And what they're missing is the science that tells us, actually, if you just begin to pursue this and show some progress towards it, that you're going to get that happiness you're seeking that you think you will only get when you get there. Correct? Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm so glad you bring this up because, you know, there are some concepts from psychology that we can start to weave into this.

1:32:05You know, I can give examples from evolutionary biology. You know, an animal that's thirsty goes out looking for water and And when it finds that first drop of clean water, dopamine is released. But maybe that's not the big lake that it needs. But that's going to tell it it's on the right path. And dopamine naturally causes neuroplasticity of whatever brain circuits were active previously. So it says, hey, whatever I did to get to this point, this milestone, not the finish line, that is something that I might want to repeat reflexively in the future. I might not want to have to work so hard to do that.

1:32:39Now, the cool thing about dopamine, many cool things about dopamine, and then it has a dark side. And we should talk about the dark side because even if, and I'm not, and of course, the dark side can be associated with drugs of abuse like cocaine and things. But actually, there's a more, even more sinister dark side that I think a lot of people fall into this trap. So, the great things about dopamine is it rewards us and it gives us energy. And when I say energy, I don't mean glycogen. I don't mean glucose. I mean neural energy. And the reason is effort of all kinds, whether or not you're writing with a pen, whether or not you're racing uphill with a weight vest, or whether or not you're, you know, slogging it out through any discomfort is generally associated with the neuromodulator adrenaline, also called epinephrine.

1:33:26okay so adrenaline in the body is it's called adrenaline in the body it's released from the adrenals and then epinephrine in the brain is released from a couple places but there's one particular place for the aficionados it's called the locus coeruleus it's in the brainstem it wakes us up it gives us a sense of urgency and it's about effort and it doesn't care if you're doing something out of love or out of hate out of revenge it does not care these are neurochemicals and they don't care about you or your life experience but they are in your brain and they are the engines. Okay. Wow. This is the Ed Mylon Show.