Overcome Negative Thoughts for Positive Thinking Feat. Dr.Daniel Amen

28:39And 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.

29:11Meanwhile, 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 neurocycle then is this five-step. It is how you manage your mind moment by moment. So it's a lifestyle. So the neurocycle 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.

29:47You 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 first 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.

30:22If 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 the neuropsycho 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.

30:52Observe 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.

31:22And 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.

32:00So 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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33:46I'm so excited about today because the woman sitting across from me is the definition of brilliant. And so, Dr. Caroline Leaf, thank you for being here today. I'm very, very flattered, very honored. Thank you. And I love talking to you. It's always just, you're an amazing interviewer. You wrote this for how to help your child. But when I'm reading the work, I'm like, this just helps humans, right? That's what it's for. But so what is something, a strategy, you said awareness of the thought helps it lose its power over you. I'm using my description of it, right? So I've always said that. Now I know why.

34:19Yes. Okay. What is something, a tactic or a strategy or a technique that somebody can use for their child or themselves that can help this in these 63 days that you would be proposing they do? Okay. So what you do is you do the five steps of the neurocycle because what I did was strategically look over the years at how can you actually find the signals and do this whole deconstruction, reconstruction thing. So you can't do it in one shot. So what you want to do is do a neurocycle, which is five steps. What are they? And I'll go through this in a moment. but you're going to do five steps in the sequence.

34:50The first part of the sequence is the first more or less three weeks where you go through the five steps in around 15 to 45 minutes, not more and not less. Then the second 42 days where you're stabilizing, you just do it in five minutes. So the five steps are basically gathering awareness. And notice I say gathering. So it's a very conscious and deliberate. It's not like a mindfulness awareness, which this is beyond that. So when we talk about mindfulness, meditation, breathing, decompression, all of those are very important to prepare the brain. So what you would do before you dive into the neurocycle, and you'll see this in my box and in my app.

35:24I've got an app as well called the neurocycle. There's a two to three minute brain preparation, which could be anything from focusing on momentum worry to doing a 310 breathing exercise. So it's something to just get the neurophysiology under control. Then you, or it could be a meditation, a prayer, whatever. Then you move into the actual work. And I'm about to slip off this chair. Okay, go ahead. Then you move into the, I get so into this. into the work of gather awareness step one. So gathering awareness is a very specific process. Everything's very layered. Your mind-brain connection, psychoneurobiology, mind-brain-body.

35:58I'm actually a psychoneurobiologist to study that connection. It's very ordered and sequenced and structured. And if you want something to change, you've got to follow the steps of the order. So the neuropsycho is a system in that you can put CBT techniques, you can put prayer, you can put whatever works for you, but put them in the right step. So when we gather awareness, we are gathering apples of a tree. We're not just randomly looking at things. You're very organized. Okay, what am I going to gather awareness of? My emotions. I'm feeling depressed. I'm feeling anxious. I'm feeling frustrated, whatever.

36:29Just label them. Related to that emotion, what am I doing? What are my behaviors? What am I doing? What am I saying? How am I doing and saying them? So maybe it's depression and maybe it's withdrawal. Then the third thing is you're going to say, how do I feel in my body when I'm feeling depressed and withdrawing? Maybe cardiovascular issues, part palpitating. And then fourth category is how am I looking at life in this moment? As I feel depressed, gut ache, and withdrawing, I feel that life sucks. Very simple example. Those are four signals. So step one is to gather those four. Step two is to ask why.

37:04You're going a little deeper. Why am I feeling these emotions? And you're not solving the whole problem. Don't try and solve it in one day. Just go as much as you can handle. It's very draining. So that's why I say limit. So it's why am I having this? Maybe I'm having this depression. I seem to be having it because it's happening a lot. I'm not sure why, but it's happening five times a day. Or it's happening once a week. Oh, if it is once a week, am I having the same behaviors? Why am I doing that withdrawing? How often am I withdrawing? What other things am I doing? Why do I think I'm doing that?

37:34So you work through each of those signals and try and get some more. Don't stay too long on those two steps and then you write. Now, you don't journal. You write. You dump. You literally dump what you've gathered awareness of and what you have reflected on. Because the first step was to gather awareness. The second step was to do this reflection thing. And then you dump it down on and literally a mind. I'm just writing it all over the page. I've developed a system called the MetaCog. And for kids, it's the BubbleCog. And it's basically writing in a way that looks like a tree. So it's starting from the middle and it's working around in circles and branches and colors and arrows and everything's connected.

38:11Everything's either on a line, in a bubble. If you don't like doing that, just write any old way. But try to write dimensionally. Don't do it in lines. Try and just put it all over the page because it brings in, forces the two sides of the brain to work together. Creates a very strong connection between the conscious and the subconscious through the bridge of the subconscious. And it starts diving deep. I mean, it's like I can tell you now that when I work with patients that had symptoms of schizophrenia, this is an extreme example, but just to show you how well this works, we would have them just basically medicoge out what all these steps I'm going through.

38:44And they would have one whole personality on the side and they'd be continuing the same conversation in another hall. So you'd see the shift and then we could show them, hey, look what's going on. And from there we could unpack and find roots and things like that. So it's phenomenal in getting insight. Now, you spoke about introspection earlier on. Introspection, insight. It means diving into the depths of the non-conscious. That's the most intelligent part of us. So is writing part of step two or is that step three? Step three. So writing is step three. Sorry. Gather awareness. Step one. Reflect.

39:11Step two. Writing. Step three. You're bringing order out of chaos. You're getting those three steps are taking deeper, deeper, deeper, getting increasing your introspection, insight, pulling up things that are associated. Now that is things all over the page. A lot of it won't make sense. Things may shock you that come out. Day one, not really, but as you progress through the days, more and more will come up. And, for example, around day seven, people start saying, oh, I never saw this connection. Day 14, like insight into, oh, that's associated with that. I didn't see that. This is why I'm doing this.

39:44So there's tremendous growth if you don't force it. You just go through the cycle. I want to interrupt you, but I want to ask you. Go ahead. Do you think during that awareness in the writing that you are uncovering some of the things that may trigger you as well? Totally. So it's step four. Excellent question. Step four is looking at what you've gathered awareness, reflected on, and written. You look, what are my triggers? What are the patterns? This has happened. What can I do? So step four is moving towards reconceptualization, reconstruction, healing, putting food on the, plant food on the roots to heal them.

40:14It's leading to that acceptance. You're not going to know why someone raped a child, why someone did this. That's their story. But that's your story. So you need to find out, I'm not crazy. I don't have a broken brain. I'm not genetically flawed. I don't have a mental illness. I'm showing up like this because of what happened to me. I can't answer why. I have to get to a certain level of acceptance. But at least I know why. It's not me. It's because of. And that helps you heal and move forward. So it's very progressive. It's not walking in circles round and around and around. You know, this is where you can bring in things like this or psychodynamic theory and AC.

40:47There's a lot of different therapy techniques that people can bring in experiences from EMDR and into all these. Because this is a system. Yeah, into these spaces. What's the fifth step? The fifth step is an action, active reach. So you go into, from the triggers and things like that, you want to move towards an antidote for today, an action for today. So what can I do today to keep me in a safe space? I've done the work for today. I'm not going to fall back into working on this anymore. I've got to get going through the day. And also your brain and mind need a rest. They get tired. So it's an action.

41:17It's like a visualization, a statement, a combination, a little prayer, an affirmation. So this is where you would fit an affirmation or a CBT type technique, like maybe a little visualization exercise. So it's something that you do and say, maybe something as simple as, I can do this, I don't know how, and then visualize a rainbow. I mean, it could be something as simple as that to an actual little technique or it could be a breathing technique. So it's an action that keeps you going through the day, which helps you focus on the fact that you are moving towards healing. So you're removing energy from this thing because this process has brought this from the non-conscious to the conscious and it's weakened these branches.

41:55In the non-conscious, it's strong and driving. When the non-conscious and conscious are working together, then this is weakened. The protein branches, the chemicals, so I can start restructuring and reorganizing. I've got to tell you what I'm thinking when you're doing this because this applies to two different people. So everybody stay in here. So those are the five steps to sort of begin to rewire yourself or change your brain. The other part of me listening to this is if you're thinking, I really don't have a lot of these issues of anxiety or worry or depression. I also think that's the formula to create a change.

42:27Like if I had a goal and ambition, I'd become aware of what I wanted. Right. I'd have all these reflections about it. I would then write about it. So and I like the idea of it not being linear like a book, but actually all over the place. So there'd be like that's almost like a dream personal vision board or dream board that you're doing. Then I'd think about what were the triggers I need to create to generate this state. Could be snapping my fingers. It could be seeing something. It could be walking into my office. It could be getting into my car. It could be a particular person. So I'd use that trigger to then create that state.

42:57And then obviously the fifth would be what's an action that I can take towards this step. So that cycle can be used to uncover trauma, you know, reverse trauma, create brain health, but can also be a creative process in order to change your life. So you are brilliant because that's exactly where I started my research. 38 years ago with people with traumatic brain injuries and learning disabilities and people that just wanted to improve their life. They just wanted, and it's called brain building. So it's the neuro cycle and that was the first iteration of this thing was to develop brain building.

43:25So it was helping kids learn. So getting data in as opposed to deconstructing, it was constructing. So it's taking from the knowledge in school to learn for an exam or what is the goal in your vision. So that's the brain building aspect of the neuro cycle. This is huge right here. I've got to tell you something because everyone always wants to create change. They're like, all right, do I get a vision board out? Like, do I? So this is a five-step process. It actually does it. To actually do it and to do it reinforced. And by the way, in 63 days, you're a different human being. Totally different.

43:54I do a thing. You're talking about visualization techniques. I should share this with you, and then maybe you can speak to why it might work. So everyone asks me, I don't visualize very well. Yes, you do. You just need to get quiet. And it's a muscle you build. You know, when you decide to start visualizing your life, it is difficult. But one thing I've done is I've created, I teach it to a lot of my athletes is I use what I call like a highlight reel technique. So what I actually start with is I start, I've never said this on the show because it's part of my private work, but I want you to speak to it.

44:21I actually start by visualizing memories from my life that are highlights. So it could be, for example, you know, the birth of my son, the birth of my daughter, a home run I hit in baseball, an award I got, a sale that I closed that was important. These are things my brain are already familiar with, to your point earlier. It's already been wired. I've already repeated the emotion. It's already in there. And so I see those things, and those are easy for me to recall because they're familiar. And then I move to what I want. So my brain, I think, begins to think they're one big highlight reel. Is there any data to prove that that's true?

44:57Meaning I'm already visualizing something I want. I've seen an achievement. I've seen an achievement. And then I see the one that I want to achieve. And for me, my brain more easily sees the future when I start with things that I'm already familiar with in my past. Because I think we do that in reverse. So if we've had a traumatic, someone's hurt us in our life. We see this, we repeat it over and over. And then we then regenerate it in our real life with the next relationship. And that's why people end up dating the same person over and over again in a different body. Exactly. Right. Exactly. Okay, so I'm jumping out of my chair with excitement because you've said exactly the correct thing.

45:33Okay. So what you've just described, remember I said a moment ago, I spoke about how I'll recall this conversation because it's a great conversation and I'll build it. Yes. That's what we're talking about here. So you are recalling these. You're recalling those and you're using those to unmask your natural resilience. Yes. That's exactly right. So I actually call these insurance policies. Okay. So when I work with a person to actually be able to build their brain, we're building an insurance policy. So you should be spending time on doing exactly that. So as you do that, you activate a whole different way that your energy flows across the two sides of your brain.

46:06You go into the highest level of intelligence. You unmask resilience. You increase your wisdom. You tune into the depths of your non-conscious where pretty much your intelligence resides. Because your conscious is basically a workhorse, and it's guided by your non-conscious. So what we've got to see is what is dominant in the non-conscious. Now, your non-conscious is a gentle lady, gentle man. And it's basically always looking for the things that are blocking this growing and keeping you stuck in those. So it's on your side. But you have to tune in to what's coming up. So when you describe when you want to do something difficult, you first think of something good.

46:43What you've done is you've listened to wisdom from your non-conscious, which is that process. You've then called those up. You've activated your resilience. You've put yourself in a highly intelligent, wise state. Now you're in a state that's more able to cope with it. So when I work with a patient, for example, I would never start with that. I would say, okay, let's talk about, you know, your favorite moments or your tell me a story about tell me a great movie. Yes. You know, let's talk about a great book, anything. And then we would focus on that. When they were in that state, I knew that I had got the mind brain connection, the psycho and neurobiology.

47:14I feel like thinking about the things that have been positive in my life or experiences creates a neurochemistry to which I can create. That's exactly what you do. Right. Yes, you have. You've changed all the flow. So these change, they increase gamma, which is a wave that you want to flow. And when your eyes are open, you want what we call low gamma across the whole brain. And then there's certain other patterns. I won't go into the details. And that's going to have a certain beta pattern and so on. Those energy waves, when they are flowing in that state, they activate the different parts of the brain to then be on high alert to respond and do what they're designed to do, which then impacts your neurochemistry, then your endocrine system, your cardio.

47:57Everything then comes together and you are in this prime state. Your HPA axis is now on high alert and you now are in the ideal state for solution finding. This is so good. You guys, this is why I do the show right here. So let me just give you this again. Step one, gather awareness. Step two, reflect. Step three, write, play, draw. Step four, recheck. Step five, active reach, which is basically what we've been describing here. I specifically invited Dr. Amy Shah to be here today. So welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. What is the main solution? If I'm because it's a it's a science that's sort of like you can't always measure all of it.

48:32Right. So I'm maybe I'm bloated or I'm inflamed or I'm fatigued or my emotions aren't in check. That sounds like it could be different bacteria for different things. Right. They all have a different name on them. Yeah. So what's this? Is there like a package solution? Like, do you just do you take probiotics? Like, yeah. What do you do if it's if it's an emotional thing or a physical thing. Well, the hundred billion dollar, you know, industry of medications and probiotics will tell you it's probiotics, but really we don't, we don't have a probiotic solution yet. In fact, some of the probiotic solutions that they've looked into actually don't work as good as dietary changes.

49:10Makes sense, right? When you're eating the bacteria, like through fermented foods or which I'll talk about, then you're actually keeping it in your gut. Whereas if you're throwing a probiotic and it's almost like throwing seeds out of an airplane at 10 ,000 feet. Like you hope that something sticks, but you're just kind of throwing it. And that's what I would think. Yeah. Some of it's flying in the wind and that's what probiotics are. And right now we still don't have a one shot solution to fixing that gut. One of the things that are counterintuitive besides diet is this concept of circadian rhythms, the sun.

49:48that piece is super easy it can improve your brain health in ways that you know you subjectively know when you go out and get some sunshine in the morning first thing it resets your entire body your brain your gut bacteria and you know every cell in your body has a clock that needs to see that sun and even if it's a cloudy day people message me all the time on instagram oh but i live in a cloudy overcast place it doesn't matter it doesn't matter it doesn't have to be bright. It can be overcast, gray, raining, whatever it is. But that natural light is very different from the artificial light that we get indoors.

50:24And if you are indoors all the time, which again, we were, you will break the clocks. You will damage the clocks. You will damage the gut bacterial clocks, and you will end up with higher rates of obesity and diabetes and high cholesterol and all of the things that we don't want that we're trying to battle. it's actually going way up by not paying attention to this okay you're awesome so so let's say so those of you that work in an office building all day long you need to hear what what she just said those you that work in cities really need to hear what she just said but I want to understand this a little bit deeper I know that we have circadian rhythms are you saying the bacteria itself has its own circadian rhythm yeah come on isn't that crazy the bacteria itself does.

51:11These bacteria, okay, by the way, we have 100 trillion and their genes outnumber the stars in the universe. They have personalities, they have food preferences, and they need sun and dark just as much as we do. Oh my goodness. What's the foods then? Yeah, they're starving to death actually, because in 97 % of Americans, we're not eating enough of what it eats as its primary food, which is fiber. Fiber. Fiber is stripped away to give you white sugar, to give you refined flour, to give you all the conveniences of today. So when you think about it that way, it makes so much sense that diseases are going up, anxiety is going up, fatigue is going up, depression is going up.

52:01Look at our food supply. Look at how much processed food we're eating, fiberless food. And now it's gotten to the point where 97 % of Americans are not getting even the minimum amount of fiber that you need to keep those bacteria alive. So should we be eating more celery or should we like take a fiber supplement? Whenever I say fiber, people are like, what brand do you recommend? No, I'm not talking about a brand. It's literally free. I mean, or low cost. You eat the food. So when you're eating a broccoli, it has fiber in it. Right. But when you're eating a white table sugar, it does not have any fiber.

52:40It's removed. So the sugar cane that it came from had tons of fiber. Have you ever had raw sugar cane? It's like the most fibrous thing you could ever eat. Right. You have to chew it and there's a ton of fiber. But what we wanted to do is make it easy, you know, convenient. And so So we stripped it all away. Same thing with wheat. You take real wheat and it's very fibrous. So we basically took real food, stripped off the fiber, and that's what we're eating as food-like substances, which is not feeding that bacteria. And not only is that bacteria dying, it's growing the wrong kinds of bacteria that's sending inflammation signals to the brain.

53:21That's making us depressed. That's making us sick. So it's just insane how this knowledge can literally, like smart entrepreneurs who's listening to this might say, oh, well, why the heck are we marketing this to all these health conscious people? Why don't we start making foods that have, you know, prebiotic fiber, which is the food for the gut bacteria? What about real fermented foods in the diet? They just published a study that showed that six fermented foods a day, which is like unheard of for most people. And I'll tell you what fermented food is. That was the amount of food that it would take to really grow and flourish that gut bacteria.

54:01And six fermented foods is like sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha. You can get probiotic yogurt, cottage cheese. You can even get probiotic cheese, which is like Gouda. And you can eat pickle. Well, anything that has live bacteria is actually so good for the gut. Even better than just eating fiber is adding those foods. And notice I didn't say any brands, any pills, anything you have to buy. It's literally the food that you eat. How long does it take to fix? Do we know? Well, it can change in as little as three days. So they took a group of people who are on a Western, very unhealthy diet, which is kind of extreme.

54:47and they changed them to a completely healthy plant-focused whole foods diet. And they saw in three days a market change in their gut microbiome. Okay. I feel like we're going so fast, right? Because I just have all this stuff I want to know for my own health and for the people that are listening to this. 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. One of the things I've learned from your work is this concept that you said earlier, but it was in the middle of so many gems, is that the brain would like to preserve energy, and I'll use it, say it my way, and move to default reflexive mode.

55:35So as many things as it can process and just default to reflexive mode rather than effort mode with critical thinking and adjustment, it will do. So your brain is constantly trying to find ways and situations and circumstances you're in to default to what you do reflexively. Okay. So would that not mean then, Andrew, that those things you do reflectively called habits and rituals better serve you or you'll default continuously to the reflexive mode of drinking or laziness or the video game or Instagram? That's a reflective default mode. Some people for stress. they encounter stress, the brain reflects to a default reflexive mode of whatever they do to cope with that stress.

56:15True? Absolutely. You know, I think I'm not alone in the noticing that occasionally I pick up my phone and I log into an app and I didn't make the conscious decision to do it. I just do it reflexively. I might even go into a sub window within that app. And the reason is that the brain and the nervous system are constantly seeking rewards and novelty. And if we're not deliberate about how we're doing that, we will do it entirely reflexively. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I enjoy social media. I teach neuroscience on Instagram. I enjoy doing that. And I enjoy the feedback of most of it.

56:55You know, I'm human. Right. So, but I think the brain and nervous system wants to make things reflexive and habits are very powerful because they set us on trajectories. Now, some people, they are uncomfortable with the fact that effort is the first gate that you have to go through in order to build this pathway that involves norepinephrine or an adrenaline and epinephrine. And sometimes people jump on me about using norepinephrine and epinephrine interchangeably. I know that they're not the same thing, but today we're just going to broadly describe them as systems in the brain and body, not get too down in the weeds.

57:32But the idea is you've got effort. You can associate that with adrenaline, epinephrine. You've got dopamine, which is your internal reward system, and it can be externally rewarded. So this is very important. There are intrinsic rewards and extrinsic rewards. There's a beautiful study that was done at Bing Nursery School at Stanford. I had nothing to do with this study in the mid-70s where they took kids that liked to draw and they then rewarded some of those kids with just a little star, like kids like, you know, the shiny star makes them special for drawing. Then they took away the star next day or the next day.

58:09And the kids that liked drawing just for the intrinsic pleasure of it, they drew less. So these reward systems can attach to external things or internal things. I have a good buddy. he's friends and co-founders of this company Made For that you talked to Blake Mycoskie about. His name is Pat Nassay. He's a former Navy SEAL. And he and I were giving a talk once to a bunch of people and we were talking about reward processes in the brain and how SEALs do it and what neuroscience thinks. And someone asked us a really good question. They said, how do I continue to tap into this dopamine system? And our answer was, be very careful with extrinsic rewards.

58:48Make sure that your dopamine system is attached more to the effort process than it ever is to any external reward. And it's because of a very important principle of dopamine rewards. It's what neuroscientists call dopamine reward prediction error. It is the reward prediction error is the reason why people that work, work, work, work, work in pursuit of a goal and then reach that goal become miserable and don't know what to do with themselves. Reward prediction error says you always need the dopamine at the final stage to exceed all the little bits of dopamine you got en route to that reward or you will actually be disappointed.

59:27You'll experience a sort of postpartum depression of sorts. So, the key is learn to attach reward to the effort process. You know, I'm not David Goggins psychologist and, but I do know David and he's come out to my lab before. We've had some conversations. I don't know what his process is, except as he's described it. But I have the sense based on what I know about neuroscience and knowing a little bit about his story and having read his book, that he's learned to attach some sort of internal reward mechanism to the pursuit and friction process. It's not about feeling good about some external milestone.

1:00:05It's about learning how to tap into this engine that we have. And I actually do believe that in knowing some people from the special operations community, that this is actually one of the things that they are selected for is not just grit or resilience. It's actually this ability to reward oneself internally in their mind as a way to buffer the effort process. It gives them more gas, more of an engine. And it's not just special operations, people that make it through cancer treatment, people that raise a special needs child or make it through a tough stage of, you know, economics in their life.

1:00:44Many people are probably in that situation right now. It's about learning how to take that strain, the feeling that you're being something or some force or some life force is trying to push you back on your heels and learning how to use self-reward, not delusional thinking, but self-reward as a means to get more energy to continue to plow forward. It's a real thing. Wow, so good. By the way, it's interesting you say that. When I interviewed Dave, we've become real good friends. We've done a lot of things together since that. He said something when I interviewed him that's along those lines, and it surprised me.

1:01:12I sort of stared at him for a minute. We were talking about the endurance races that he does. And he goes, I don't care if I win.

1:01:48And I just stared at him. that were doing math problems or other kinds of puzzles that they knew they couldn't get right, but they enjoy doing them and they perform exceedingly well on lots of sorts of tests of that sort when there is the right answer, of course. And so what they do is they've somehow they're wired for effort. They're wired for the puzzle, not for the solution. And when I say puzzle, I don't mean the noun puzzle. I mean the verb for being puzzled. For them, it feels good. And so we need to think if we're talking about the nervous system and we want to make it actionable for high performance, whether or not it's in business or sport or otherwise, we want to think in terms of processes, not events, and verbs, not nouns.

1:02:31So growth mindset as a verb, as an action item, you know, reward as a verb, not just as a, oh, you're going to just pat yourself on the back. Like it's no, it's what you internalize. It's a process. that's how the neural circuits that underlie reward get stronger and the beauty of the brain is that you have this thing of neuroplasticity which is its ability to change itself throughout the whole lifespan and the more you practice this the better you get at it and it does not mean you're walking around talking delusionally about how great life is when everything is terrible it means you might even be very stoic you might be hopefully you're very rational but you have the energy to continue to push forward whereas other people are going to be dropping out because everybody shows up gritty and resilient and they watch their inspirational aspirational story one of the big motivations for me being here today and in general of my lab is to try and make these concepts from psychology and personal development and high achievement to make them what we call operational meaning give them definitions that people can grab onto and apply and not just have to watch, you know, 50, you know, everyone loves the Rocky movie.

1:03:42I mean, it's super, it makes you feel really good. It makes you feel like anything's possible, but you don't always have access to that. By the way, it's amazing that you just said that because I was reflecting, brother, I love when energy's prevalent, even on Zoom. While you were talking, I was thinking about David and I talking again. We're both as kids, these crazy Rocky fans. We both watch Rocky one and two literally thousands of times. And what we were both struck by in the movie is exactly what you're describing it wasn't Rocky winning. It's this time where Apollo Creed knocks him down. He puts his arms up and he thinks he's won the fight.

1:04:15I get emotional even saying it. And it's a movie and Sly's a buddy of mine. And I know he's an actor, you know, and you turn back and Apollo Creed looks at Rocky and he starts to get back up again. And Creed's just like, what? And the inspirational aspect of that, Rocky wasn't winning, was the effort deposit, was the pursuit, right and so guys if you've ever heard about this before like this is scientific proof that you've got to be giving yourself the reward for the effort deposit my guest here today is an expert on optimum brain performance on learning on learning quickly and on maxing out your capacity to think and perform in your life my guest today is the great jim quick jim thank you ed thank you so much i've been looking forward to this so much me too brother let's just go back just a little bit because I want to give people context because I really believe life happens for us not to us and it's the meaning in our life of the events that happen to us not the event but the meaning we take from it and so you've become this world-renowned expert you've worked with the Dalai Lama Richard Branson right some of the highest profile celebrities in the world most successful business people but it's ironic that that was founded out of a boy with a broken brain right and that was because you had fallen and hurt your head is that right like a five-year-old or Tell us that story real quick.

1:05:32You know, it's funny. I just posted this on Instagram today. I said, difficult times could define us, they could diminish us, or they could develop us. You decide. Because ultimately, we do decide. And yeah, I'm such a big fan of yours. Thank you. And follow over your work. And first of all, before we get started, I appreciate everyone who's watching this. And what I love is you are the person you are on and off camera. Oh, thank you. And that means a lot to me. You know, your humility because you're so accomplished. And so the reason why I'm excited about this is because I think this message we have to talk to people about is so important because your brain controls everything.

1:06:09Yeah. Right. And when people see me on stage, they'll see me have 100 people stand up and I'll memorize all their names as they introduce themselves or 100 words or 100 numbers that they give me forwards and backwards. I've seen this man have 100 people give him two numbers out of sequence and he'll repeat back 100 people's multiple numbers like this. And here's the thing. I always tell people I don't do this to impress you. I do this to express to you what's really possible Because the truth is every single person that's listening and watching this could do that and a lot more Oh my gosh, the thing is we weren't taught You know if anything we were taught a lie that somehow our our capabilities our potential our memory for instance Our learning abilities or intelligence is somehow fixed like our shoe size and it's absolutely not true We've discovered more about the human brain in the past 20 years than the previous 2 ,000 years combined And what we found is we've grossly underestimated our own potential, our own capabilities.

1:07:01And that's the thing. It's just because we weren't taught. And I really think the nature of the work that you do, that I do, that our community is really backing is about transcending. It's about ending the trance. Wow. Transcend, end the trance. Ending this mass hypnosis in media and marketing that's telling us that we're broken. Yeah. That we need to be fixed. That we're not enough. And I feel like that is what holds us back. You know, this disillusion, if you will. That's remarkable. Did you feel that way as a little guy? You know, when I was five years old, as you mentioned, I had this accident.

1:07:34Head trauma, brain injury, traumatic brain injury. After that, my parents said I was never the same. You know, I became extremely shy, introverted. I had learning difficulties. I was labeled. And a label is tough, right? You know, when you're put in special classes, I couldn't understand things. My teachers would repeat themselves four or five times. and I would pretend to understand like sometimes we do as an adult because we have this imposter syndrome. We always want to look good. We don't want to ever make a mistake, which I feel like also holds us back. In this space, the things you teach can affect someone's life like this and that's what I love.

1:08:08So can we talk about some of those things? Absolutely. I'm just fascinated. Like, look at me, right? We only have an hour. I wish we had 17. This episode is brought to you by Marshalls, where you never have to compromise between quality and price. The buyers of Marshalls hustle hard, working to bring you great deals on brand name and designer pieces because Marshalls believes everyone deserves access to the good stuff. Visit a Marshalls store near you or shop online at marshalls.com.

1:08:42When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th. And never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end-to-end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at whatsapp.com. That 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.

1:09:19What an honor it is to be with this gentleman here today and to share him with all of you. Most of you are probably familiar from him for the first time from The Secret. He's one of the stars, if not the star of The Secret. So I have John Assaraf here with me today. John, thanks for being here, brother. Ed, it's so good to be here. And thank you for giving me the honor to be here with you. So I'll start with the story first, and then I'll share beliefs and then what to do. So we have some practical things that you can start doing today. So back in 1987, when I bought the franchising rights for Remax of Indiana, I had no idea how to build a company.

1:09:56I was 26 years old. But I had another mentor who I invested$75 ,000 to become his partner to have the opportunity to learn from this man who at the time was worth probably$100 million. dollars and so I was very very keen on learning and I didn't know how to build a business I didn't know anything other than how to sell real estate and I set a goal to generate one billion dollars a year in sales and I set the goal for five years in the future not knowing a billion dollar goals like mind-boggling big for me and I there was an interview the second week I was in Indianapolis I from Toronto to Indianapolis for this opportunity.

1:10:40And I was interviewed by the Indianapolis Business Journal, and I said in the interview that I had a goal for a billion dollars. And the reporter said, are you aware that there's two companies that have been in the state of Indiana for 80 years, one, 100 years the other one, and they haven't hit a billion dollars in real estate sales in all of these years? And I said, yeah, I know, it's Graves and Tucker, and you can let them know that I'll be the first, right? And as I said that, I almost felt like I put my foot right in my mouth because I didn't know how I was going to do it. Long story short, five years later, we sold enough franchise, recruited enough agents.

1:11:13We did$1.2 billion. And we were stuck, which is a great place to be stuck. And I was asking myself, how is it possible that I'm training these agents with strategies, with tactics, with selling skills, marketing skills? We were like the gurus of here's the books, here's the cassettes, here's the trainers, here's like out of the deep end. And the agents who, for example, would make$30 ,000 a year kept making$30 ,000 a year. The agents who made$50 ,000 kept making$50 ,000. The agents who made$100 ,000 kept making$100 ,000. And so I realized that they weren't missing the skills or the knowledge. There was something else at play.

1:11:53And what helped me from the age of 19 to 27, 28, 30 was every single day, and I still do it today, and I'll share this with you in just a little bit. every single day. I was priming my brain with the beliefs and the self-image required to achieve the goals that I wanted. So I got 75 agents together who agreed to pay$3 ,000 each to be part of an inner game training. Forget the outer game, the inner game training. We worked on affirmations, visualization, mindfulness, meditation, listening to our affirmations on our vision on our cassette recorders. We had little cassettes we put in our cars. And so I had them work on their self-image and self-worth and self-esteem and to develop the beliefs that we were going to imprint or impregnate into their subconscious mind by listening to these audios every single day, twice a day, and while they were driving.

1:12:53And those 75 agents over six months increased sales by$100 million. dollars my gosh we didn't teach them one thing about selling more we taught them about changing their identity and their belief structure so that it matched the goals they wanted to achieve and then i said holy shit this works even for other people not just me so we started to teach that to all of our agents and we created these cassettes with these recordings on them of the beliefs that we needed them to to believe the self-image that they deserved that they were good enough they were smart enough and we went from 1.2 billion to four and a half billion a year wow within four years wow and that's my beliefs and so guys that's a little bit of beliefs and believing in a new self-image and identity in a new story gosh so good you're going to tell us about beliefs what they are yeah so so when you were born were you born with any beliefs no were you born with any habits?

1:13:54No. Were you born with any fears? No. No. So from a neuroscience and neuropsychology perspective, a belief is nothing more than this. Imagine that you're born and your brain's made up of a hundred billion marbles. And every time you have an experience or somebody says something to you, you read something or you watch something, these marbles make these connections. And the connections that are reinforced go from conscious connections to subconscious connections. And once these subconscious connections are made and reinforced, they run the show 98 % of the time. So a belief is nothing more than a reinforced pattern in the brain.

1:14:32And our conscious brain can choose what we want when we're in that part of our brain, but our subconscious mind can't choose. it's programmed from the age of zero to three in the imprinting years three to about seven or eight the modeling years and then eight on it's the experiential years and so if you have these powerful beliefs that you're good enough you're smart enough you're worthy to achieve the goals that you have if you have these powerful beliefs you are able to achieve any amount of income you choose no matter what the amount is you just need to learn how so if you have these empowering beliefs, you have brain coherence between conscious and subconscious.

1:15:12What if you said, okay, I want to make, let's just say$100 ,000 a year or a million. It doesn't make a difference. And I asked you, what do you need to believe about yourself to achieve this? So I need to believe I'm smart enough. Good. Write down, I am smart enough. What else do you need to believe? I need to believe that I am worthy. I need to believe that I deserve this. I need to believe that it's possible. I need to believe you write down five or six or seven beliefs. They're just words on a sheet of paper. Now, let me stop for just a moment. I'm going to tell a story and come back to this.

1:15:45I want you to imagine that somebody tapped you on the shoulder sometime today and say, hey, I work with Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks in Hollywood, and we have this new script, okay, that if you get really good at this script where you could read it in front of a camera without the script, we'll pay you 10 million bucks. Now, I want you to imagine you've never seen the script, you don't know how to act, but they said to you, we're going to give you an acting coach, we're going to give you everything you need to memorize the script, we're going to give you everything you need to act it perfectly.

1:16:19What would you do to take that script that's on a piece of paper that you've never seen before, what would you do to take that script to make it yours for you to own it? And the answer is you probably read it like what once? Would you read it maybe 100 times, 200 times, 500 times? You think you might role play with somebody while you're holding the script in your hand? Do you think you might research the role? Do you think you might take a camera and practice it? And do you think that if you practice it one time, 50 times, 100 times, 500 times, you can finally put the script down and you can get in front of the camera and go, boom, here is the script.

1:16:55Do you think you could do that? Well, guess what? A script it's on a piece of paper that you don't believe with practice you start to believe so what happens if you take a belief system and you start to imprint it into your subconscious mind initially through conscious repetition but there are ways to access the subconscious mind that we know today that are faster and easier than just doing it consciously and so you take a vision of you achieving your goals and dreams you take the beliefs you need you learn how to manage your emotions a little bit better and then you develop the habits which again are nothing more than neural patterns in the brain have been reinforced and when you learn how to deactivate the destructive ones and activate constructive ones through spaced repetition and reinforcement now you are resetting your default way of being so a belief is nothing more than a reinforced pattern that if you learn how to deactivate it and create a new one, it's like a software upgrade for your brain.

1:18:00Wow. So guys, what he didn't say, so good, John. Thank you. Guys, this is stuff that you pay thousands of dollars for, but you, by the way, can get in his book and you get here because I know him for free. But guys, what he didn't say is beliefs are necessarily true. No, don't tell me. And this is important. You know, I've told you many times, everybody, that your thoughts aren't necessarily true. Your beliefs are not necessarily true. They're patterns reinforced over time. And so if you could create this new script that's reinforced these patterns over time, that's a conscious way of doing it.

1:18:32Give us one key. He said, we know now there's subconscious ways to do it that are faster and more powerful. Give us one that is a new hack to do this. So one that everybody's heard of and very few people do unless you're a professional athlete, astronaut, or Navy SEAL is visualization. Yes, thank you. Simple, simple, simple. I know you had Phil Mickelson on in the past and I watched him. And if you think about visualization is simulation. Now, here is the difference. Whoa, whoa, that's good. Okay, go ahead. So visualization is simulation. So when we close our eyes, or even if our eyes are open, and we start to use our Einstein brain, the imagination, we now have just activated one of the biggest centers of our brain, the occipital lobe that's connected to the motor cortex.

1:19:20It's connected to the motivational circle, the nucleus that releases that dopamine that makes you feel good, that makes you want to take action. So if you visualize yourself achieving the goal, If you visualize yourself behaving in ways that match the new belief, if you even visualize the words or you take the words on a sheet of paper and you read them, run your right finger across it, run your left finger across it, close your eyes, see it and feel it, your brain is creating a mental movie with the words. And as it creates a mental movie with the words, that's happening in your subconscious mind.

1:20:00And when you give the subconscious these instructions, a couple things happen because of the way the brain hierarchy works. Number one is survival, but then number two is safety. And then number three is energy conservation. Now, when you do something 20, 30, 40, 50 times, It takes about 66 days to 365 days of repetition to override an old habitual circuit. Not 10 days, not 21 days, 66 to 365. So if you visualize yourself achieving the goal, feeling the success that you want to feel, seeing the belief on the screen of your mind, you are actually creating a neural network through the science of neuroplasticity.

1:20:45and the networks that you reinforce become the most dominant networks. And since your brain wants to conserve energy, if you do this on a consistent basis, your brain says, okay, you're doing this so often. Let me just make this automatic. Let me set aside the old beliefs. Let me replace it with the new beliefs. And now you've deliberately and consciously evolved yourself. Oh, my gosh. So, guys, it's patterns. John, thank you. John used a word earlier, which was coherence, and it can fly by. But when you've done this hard work, and I say fun work, by the way, on your subconscious brain, your subconscious mind, what happens is now when you set that ambitious goal, there's a coherence between what's lying underneath you and what's on the surface.

1:21:28And that's why, you know, people, you all have someone, you know, when they point their mind at something, it's almost like a weapon. When they point themselves at a dream, they draw it towards them. Part of that's energy. Part of that's vibration. But a big part of that is coherence in your brain. And so you've got to do this difficult work that you might think is difficult, which, by the way, is fun, is easy. And it's really just a matter of patterns and taking control of your life, taking control of the things you do. You can literally, everybody, change your life. You can change the external parts of your life by changing the internal or the inner sizes that he teaches part of your life.

1:22:06That's why I do this show. What we're talking about. Can I just piggyback on something? Please. Since you picked up on the word coherence and you mentioned the law of attraction earlier, for the people who think that the law of attraction is, you know, think, believe, and you'll achieve. First, I'm going to tell you that's bullshit. So let's call it bullshit.

1:22:30But I want you to think of your brain just a little bit differently and think of it this way. Let's say you love rock and roll. And let's say rock and roll is on station 95.5. If you're on station 92.1, that might be classical. If you're on station 98.7, that might be punk rock. But a 92.5, that's rock and roll. So imagine coherence just means locking your electromagnetic spectrum of your brain. Lock it and load it on exactly what you want. So what's the vision? What's the goal? What are the beliefs? What are the emotions that create coherence so you're locked and loaded to the frequency of the universe that is matching that goal.

1:23:14Part one, part two is when you get locked and loaded, you've actually activated the Einstein brain connected to the motor cortex, connected to the dopamine release in your body. And when that happens, okay, now you're in coherence, but there's another part that happens in this Einstein part of the brain. That's actually what the latest neuroscientists psychologists are thinking is connected to this GPS part of our brain to the frequency of where all of the tools resources people are that resonate with that frequency so we've been evolving for what two and a half million years since Homo erectus to now 108 billion humans on earth with a brain that's been changing and growing and my belief is we're just scratching the proverbial surface when we talk about you know a little quantum mechanics or quantum phase with entanglement how we're all connected we're all tuning into the frequencies that are us and within us and all around us now when we learn to use our brain better it's just mind-boggling how we can achieve goals and dreams that we thought were impossible to achieve before this is the fun part now that to me this is the fun part and by the way When you see two people that are vibrating at frequency like this, you get an interview like what you're experiencing right now, everybody.

1:24:36Like we both have done lots of interviews and we know when we're in the midst of a great one. And everyone, I just want to be clear, please follow John, please. And if you're listening to the show or watching it, share my show. My gosh, people need to know this. You know, someone you care about or believe in or love that should be hearing these things. A couple more tips. And then I want to talk about something pretty serious at the end, if you don't mind, because you're just such a pleasure. But one of the ways that you can do some of this work, many of you know about vision boards, and we can have a competent person talk about it.

1:25:05John, I can have you touch on that a little bit. But John goes even deeper into these accomplished boards, I think you call them. And he's got a crap board, which I've never flipping heard of in my life. And again, guys, you're just not going to get this anywhere else. I am so grateful to this man sitting across from me is here today for a lot of reasons. Number one, he's changed so many lives in my lifetime, and I grew up listening to him on Loveline. And so I'm really grateful to have Dr. Drew sitting in this seat finally across from me today. Finally, indeed. It's such a privilege. We have mutual friends.

1:25:36We kind of live near each other in weird ways. It's all odd, but I'm so glad I'm here. It is odd. I want to talk about heart, brain, what I call coherence or whatever. And you said you wanted to talk about that a little bit today. So I said earlier that I've done a lot of work. Some of that work has been therapy, reading, having friends like you in my life that I literally I've just become more self-aware. And a lot of times, just my awareness of some of my behavioral patterns, it's lost some of its power over me. Oh, 100%. That's why there's a whole category in treatment, frankly, called psychoeducation.

1:26:08Okay. And interestingly, early in my therapy, I had to understand what was happening before I felt comfortable going in. Going in. So I read a ton of stuff before. And the therapist was like, why do you, I just, I need to understand. I just need to. Well, for me, it wasn't just that. It was like I've produced an externally really pretty good life. And I was afraid, if I'm being candid, that if I change some of these patterns that I had in my life, that although maybe I have a little bit more set in peace, but I'd lose my edge. I'd lose my success. By the way, I think my audience listening resonates with what I just said deeply.

1:26:41But here's the thing about treatment and healing. You have to be one of the – your brain hates change. Our brain fight changes just the way we hate. We don't want our arm cut off. We don't want to change fundamentally who our brain thinks we are. But you have to be prepared to become whoever you're supposed to be. Wow. And that is a really hard thing for people to do. I went through it myself. It's you have to kind of let go and let things happen. And your brain fights you. And that's kind of why when I recommend professionals get involved, that's their skill set is working around and through those resistances.

1:27:19That's one of the most important things someone said, because what I ended up finding out, because this is like an achiever audience overall, right? I ended up finding out that, in fact, I externally produced way more abundance in my life when I had patterns that served me in my life and I gave myself the gift of a little bit more equanimity and peace in my life. One of the things I did also work on, though, was what I'd like you to elaborate on because you'd be better at it than me. But I've worked on small things all the way to like my breathing. Oh, sure. To, you know, alter my HRV rate so that I've got a little bit more heart and brain coherence, which most people don't know about.

1:27:56So just riffed on that. Well, I just, there's a guy named Stephen Porges. Okay. If you want to read about the neurobiology of attachment and regulation, Alan Shore is your guy and Peter Fonagy, who really has worked out this socio-emotional exchange system, which is something that's evolutionarily built into not just our bodies, but actually into our development. And so there is – I'm going to have trouble explaining this in a way that's cohesive, but I'm going to try. Anyway, the brain, the base of the brain, the brainstem, the cranial nerves, and the autonomic and parasympathetic nervous systems all develop together and are embedded in the face, the ear, the vocal cords through something called the brachial pouches, which is these things that develop into our face and neck and whatever, and the sympathetic outflow to our heart and gut.

1:28:54And it turns out it's obviously the face and our voice and our ear is how we exchange emotionality. We are exquisitely sensitive to what's going on other people's faces. And what goes on in our faces can have micro, micro changes that the other person, maybe even not on a conscious level, is able to read and receive as information about the other person's emotional states. So we ultimately learn to regulate our emotions through being in and around other people. Our identity comes from being in and around other people. Like we said, the brain is embedded in the body, but the brain body is embedded in a social system.

1:29:32And how it manifests, you mentioned earlier about trends and things and how they affect people, they do. I'm interested in that. I'm not an expert in that, but I read a lot about that stuff these days. History is one of my weak spots, so I've read a ton about it trying to make sense of it all. But the socio-emotional exchange system is also connected through various nuclei in the brainstem to the vagus nerve, the gut, and then the sympathetic outflow. Something like 70 % or 80 % of the vagus is an inflow to the brain. When I went to medical school, we were taught, well, the vagus is a system that maybe changes your acid secretion in your stomach and slows your heart down.

1:30:15Right. No, 70 % of it is getting information from your body and taking it back to the brain. To the brain. Goes that way. It's crazy. Goes that way. And it's deeply embedded in this socio-emotional exchange system. And he has all this doubt about how heart rates change and breathing change with our emotional states. It's from infancy. From infancy. Infancy. What have you done in that world for yourself? I like the breathing stuff. I try to do that. I'm not a religious. My thing has been the psychotherapeutic process. I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this, but as it pertains to breathing and heart rate and facial expressions and stuff, I know when I'm around great therapists that are highly attuned to their patients because when I see them work or I interact with them, I notice I start breathing with them too.

1:31:02Interesting. Literally, my heart rate and breathing starts syncing up with that other person. Yeah. And when I become aware of – I've actually been – this one woman who I've become close with who treats sex addiction, actually, I saw her in a video working with a patient, and I noticed it was happening to me, and I went, oh, this woman has got – No way. This woman's got powers. And so I got to know her, and lo and behold, she really is an exquisite therapist. And they can just be fully present and attuned to that person on not just an attentive, attentional level, but the whole body is an instrument.

1:31:37And if you've ever been in a therapeutic process where your body is present like that, it's weird. I've been the subject of it as a patient, and I've helped other people by being the antenna. And you experience things and smell things and hear things that are not yours. And you know it because you've never experienced these things before. And really the – I'll tell you a story in a second about my favorite story with this. I tell it all the time. But the real art in the therapeutic process is not just receiving, listening with your whole body, I call that, but knowing when to bring it in the room.

1:32:14In other words, when to go, you know, I'm having an experience. And I'll tell you a story about that. I had this guy that was severely traumatized. And usually it's traumatized parts of the self that are needing attention that aren't, the patient isn't even aware, isn't there in the room with that patient at the time. It's sort of a walled off part of themselves that's screaming for some kind of attention. And this guy was coming in and as he would sit down every day, I started hearing the opening riff on Mad Men. I was like, where is that coming from? I don't hear that normally. And I thought, well, isn't that interesting?

1:32:52And damn it, every time he would start, he walked in the room. Well, then it got weirder. Then as we were working together, it wasn't that long. There's a few visits. I started feeling like I was that shadowy character falling through the buildings, right? Yes. So I had that feeling. And I was like, whoa, this is interesting. But I didn't bring it up with the patient because he was talking about horrible trauma and all these horrible things that happened to him. And then about halfway through one of these visits later, music kicked in. I'm falling. And all of a sudden, I experienced myself as a baby falling through these buildings.

1:33:32As I talk about it now, it constricts my chest. It was an overwhelming experience. I couldn't stay with it. It was like, it just took my breath away. It's like this incredibly traumatic feeling. And I thought, I have to bring it up. And I said, listen, I actually interrupted him. He was telling another traumatic story. I said, look, I'm having an experience, and I'm wondering if this is meaningful to you. And I told him what I've been experiencing. He became furious, stormed out of the room. You and your psychobabble. How dare you? You think you know what you're talking about? And just ran out of the room.

1:34:05Whoa. And I thought, hmm, maybe that wasn't the right time to bring that in. Comes back in the next day and he sits down calmly and says, how did you know? He goes, how did you know? All I hear is the baby, the baby, the baby screaming in my head. It's going all the time. And because of the depth of that attunement, he and I were, he trusted me. And by the way, if you've been traumatized, trust is a big deal. We were able to kind of work together for a while. And I always see that. Wow, wow, wow. Yeah. And so I would get people in working with people with trauma and addiction and stuff. I'm always getting them at the front end at the beginning of their treatment.

1:34:40And I really always conceived of my role, other than get them through the medical stuff, to teach them that you could be fully appreciated. I can fully experience you. And you can trust that. You can stay close to another person. And they don't abuse. They don't. Nothing. They'll be there for you. Wow. It makes me emotional just thinking about it. Yeah, it makes me emotional. The part of it that makes me emotional is to understand how connected humans can actually be together. It's unbelievable. Right. It's unbelievable, right? Right. And so when you ask, can, and that's, you know, it's weird, right?

1:35:16It's almost psychic-y kind of stuff. And every therapist who does this kind of work has had these experiences where you feel a pain somewhere that's not yours or you hear music or you see something. and um but of course then we we affect each other on a on a macro scale too right i i don't understand why they're these huge trends you know why it happens i'm trying to understand that and it feels to me like it's sort of french revolution type trend you know like where people are bringing out guillotines and things same here this is the end mylin show

1:35:54Thank you.