3 BRAIN HACKS to Control Your Thoughts & Emotions

0:00The brain and the body are constantly in dialogue. So I think it's very hard to control negative thoughts directly by trying to suppress them. Generally, they tend to just want to continue to geyser up all the time. But we can introduce a positive thought. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

0:36Welcome to this special masterclass. We brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful. So let's go ahead and dive in.

0:54Say I feel cold and ice, right? I'm in ice. It's 30 degrees. can I control my mind to say, you know what, this is actually a hot tub and you feel warm and you're feeling hot right now? Or is it too much physiological barriers to break through that? To some extent you can. So I think the question that you're asking is a very important one. It's actually the question, which is to what extent does our subjective narrative, the story we tell story we tell ourselves actually means something for the body. And to what extent does the body actually mean something for the subjective narrative? So this gets into some areas of work that we're doing now.

1:39And so I do want to highlight that it's ongoing work. But I think, you know, the old narrative, meaning a few 10 years ago, was that if you're feeling depressed, just smile. Well, if that worked, we would have a lot less depression than we see out there. Right, right. Now that does not mean... Most people actually who are depressed just aren't smiling as well. Like when you change your physiology, doesn't it also start to change the way you think about yourself a little bit? The reason I call it a brain-body contract early on is that the brain and the body are constantly in dialogue. So, you know, the idea that when we're depressed, we tend to be in more defensive type postures.

2:18When we're feeling good, we tend to be in more like relaxed and extended postures. All true. But it does not mean that just by occupying the extended posture that I'm going to completely shift the mind. That's a first step. Think about like two interlocking gears. It's one gear that turns the other, but then they need to kind of dance together before you can get the whole system going. So how do you get it to dance together? Exactly. So subjective, there is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful over states of mind and body. To answer your question, can you think your way out of the ice bath being cold?

2:51So a couple things that are important. First of all, just to go a little deeper on what thoughts are. Thoughts happen spontaneously all the time. They're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection. But thoughts can also be deliberately introduced. For instance, right now, I can say, okay, have a thought that just decide to write your name. And you can do that. I'm going to decide to write my name and you can do it. So that's a deliberate thought, which says that you can introduce thoughts. So I think it's very hard to control negative thoughts directly by trying to suppress them. Generally, they tend to just want to continue to geyser up all the time.

3:29But we can introduce a positive thought. Can you think of two thoughts at the same time? Probably not. So you can only have one thought at a time. Right, but they come very fast. But it comes and goes. So you have to constantly be intentional and deliberate about what you think. Otherwise, a spontaneous thought will pop back in based on your experience, based on sensory, based on how you're feeling or perceiving something, your environment. It's just going to keep popping in. So how do we deliberately have a positive thought more often? Right. So I'm a big fan of wellness, and I think it's a great community.

4:04But it tends to run in absolutes, and there aren't a lot of operational definitions, as we say, in science. And what I love about your question is you're asking for really getting to the meat of things, asking for the operational definitions. One of the most dangerous ideas in wellness and in popular psychology is that your body hears every thought you have. What a terrible thing to put on people. You know, what a challenging thing. I don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts. I think there is great value, however, to introducing positive thought schemes. Now, the reason is not because I think it's just because I think so, but because there's actually a neurochemical basis for controlling stress and actually making stress more tolerable and extending one's ability to be in bouts of effort.

4:49And that relates to the dopamine pathway. So the molecule dopamine is a reward. It's released in the brain when you win a game, you close a deal, you meet the love of your life. Someone likes your photo. Someone likes your photo. The great love of your life. if you complete something. But most of our dopamine release is not from achieving goals. It's actually released when we are en route to our goals, where we're in pursuit of our goals and we think we're on the right path. This is why a lot of people get depressed after they achieve a big goal because they feel like I'm supposed to feel something greater.

5:22I felt this thing for two minutes and now that's it? That's right. High achievers know to attach dopamine to the effort process. To the pursuit, the day-to-day tasks, the growth, the lessons, the losses, like everything, right? Well, and it can be to some wins along the way. But growth mindset, which is the academic discovery and laboratory discovery of my colleague Carol Dweck at Stanford, is the hallmark of growth mindset is really two things. One is I'm not where I want to be now, but I'm capable of getting there eventually. The other is to attach a sense of reward to the effort process itself.

5:58In fact - Don't reward the result, reward the effort. That's right. And if you look at true high performers, people that are consistently good at what they do, they don't peak and go through the postpartum depression and crash and come back and their life is a cycle of ups and downs, but really people who are on that upward trajectory consistently, those people attach dopamine to the effort process. And actually Carol's, one of her original studies on the discovery of growth mindset was these kids that love doing math problems that they knew they couldn't get right. So it's like the people love puzzles, but in this case, they knew they couldn't get it right, but they love doing it.

6:34And incidentally or not so incidentally, these kids are fantastic at math when there is a right answer because they feel some sense of reward from the effort process. Now the cool thing about dopamine is that it's very subjectively controlled. We can all learn to secrete dopamine in our brain in response to things that are in a in a purely subjective way. Our interpretation. Our interpretation. But it has to be attached to reality. So, you know, one should never confuse - What is real? Right. So if you're thinking about the effort you're expending, so let's say somebody right now is financially back on their heels, and they're setting up a new business, for instance, and it's hard.

7:20If they can take a few moments or minutes each day to reflect on the fact that the effort process is allowing them to climb out of their hole potentially, that it's giving them an opportunity, that it's somehow they are on the right path or if they're not in movement along that path or at least oriented on the right path, they're not lying in bed all day. They're taking a step forward. They're taking a step. If they can reward that process internally, two things happen. First of all, the brain circuits that are associated with building subjective rewards and dopamine get stronger. So you get better at that process.

7:57And second, and most importantly, dopamine has an amazing ability to buffer adrenaline and buffer epinephrine. And what I mean by that is there was a study that was published in the journal Cell, excellent journal, Cell Press journal a couple of years ago, showing that with repeated bouts of effort, we use and we release more and more epinephrine. It's kind of adrenaline, but in the brain. With more effort, we release this. Every time. Every time you put in effort. So every time you make, for this, let's keep it, if I were to keep it in the business context, every time you write that email, every time you, let's see, it's a person who's a craftsman or a craftswoman, every time you're working in the shop and doing that, every bit of effort, you're taking a little bit of money out of this epinephrine account.

8:41You're spending epinephrine. At some point, those levels of epinephrine get high enough that you feel like quitting. It feels It feels exhausted. And this was done in a beautiful study actually where they control the visual environments and they have the subjects exert effort and they can control the visual environment. So sometimes the effort of taking steps and moving forward, this is actually kind of pushing forward and kind of swimming motion, would give them the sensation that they were actually making progress. And other times it was an exercise in futility where they would just keep the visual world stationary and they would expend effort and they didn't think they were going anywhere.

9:19my gosh epinephrine is climbing climbing climbing and eventually they quit now dopamine is able to push back on that epinephrine and give you anyone the that feeling that you could continue and maybe even the feeling that you want to continue and you've seen this actually football is a good example two teams play say the super bowl both teams are max effort the entire time yeah max effort, the team that wins suddenly in a moment has the energy to jump all over the place, party for days. They can talk. I mean, they have energy. They're exhausted right before that. Well, that wasn't glycogen or stored energy of any kind, except it was neural energy.

10:00And what happened was effort is this adrenaline, adrenaline, adrenaline, adrenaline. Eventually people quit. They just quit. The dopamine is able to suppress that. And so then you're expending effort, but you're doing it from a place of feeling like you have energy for it. So we need dopamine to keep the effort going. Is that what I'm hearing you say? That's right. Dopamine is not just about reward. It's one of the biggest misconceptions. Dopamine is about motivation and drive. It's like a jet that propels you along a path. How do we get more dopamine? You practice subjectively releasing dopamine in your mind.

10:35Like how? Okay, so that's a great question. First of all, there are ways you can get more dopamine release through thoughts or through drugs or through supplements. I want to be really clear. There is a drug, there are two drugs actually, that will cause massive release of dopamine. They're called cocaine and methamphetamine. That's what gets us addicted because it feels so good. The problem is, exactly, the problem is cocaine and methamphetamine stimulates so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source. It becomes the goal and the path. It becomes the path and the destination.

11:08And you look at people's lives when they do a lot of cocaine and methamphetamine and that baseline on their life goes down very, very fast. Because there's no reason to work hard at anything else because you feel good. That's right. And that's the greatest feeling you'll have. So why do anything else when you can have that feeling? That's right. And if you think about, remember these neurochemical systems, adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, epinephrine, they weren't designed to keep us safe from tigers and to hunt and gather or to build Fortune 500 companies. they were designed to do anything. They were designed to be generic so that depending on our circumstances, we could adapt.

11:43So in an animal context, an animal that let's say is hunting or it needs food for its young, it's going to feel agitation. That's stress. That's cortisol. It's like hunger. My babies might not eat. I might not eat. Maybe it's looking for a mate. It's going to feel agitation and start looking and roaming and searching foraging is called in the animal behavior world it's foraging at some point it might catch a smell of something a potential mate or berries or a stream if it's thirsty at that moment dopamine is released and now it has energy to continue along that path whereas there's a specific pathway in the brain and that's involved in depression and disappointment that if it goes to that place and turns out it was the wrong path There's a signal that actually suppresses dopamine so that you don't repeat that mistake again.

12:34So you don't give up. That's right. You just don't repeat it again. That's right. And those events that - So it reminds you like that's not the path to go down. That's right. And we're sort of veering towards neuroplasticity here, which is the brain's ability to change itself in response to experience. Dopamine is one of the strongest triggers of neuroplasticity because it says those actions led to success previously. You're going to repeat those. Those actions led to failure previously, and don't repeat those. So dopamine triggers us to stay on the right path. That's right. So you asked, how do you do this?

13:07So to really make it concrete. And is there such a thing as too much dopamine if you're not on drugs? So cocaine and amphetamine are bad because they lower the baseline on life. They make people very focused on things outside of themselves. That's the other thing that dopamine does. It can be positive or negative. but when we have dopamine in our system, we tend to be outward facing and in pursuit of things in our environment. You can look at somebody on cocaine and realize that that's the extreme version of that. But I love social media for the reason that you see the molecules in the memes. So it's like, get after it.

13:44What do sharks do on Monday? Or I can't remember the specific things. Or then they're like, sometimes it's just time to chill. Well, that's a different molecule. That's serotonin, right? And then dopamine is the get after it molecule. And epinephrine is effort. So if we were going to break this down really concrete, we'd say adrenaline and epinephrine are about effort, just effort with no subjective label on them, good or bad, effort. Whether or not it's stress or you're pursuing something you want to do, it's just exerting effort. Dopamine is about reward, but more so about motivation and pursuit of rewards.

14:21What happens when we bring the two together? Grief and sadness and gratitude and appreciation? Yeah, so what the research shows in this expressive journaling is that when people journal, and you can even journal 20 minutes a day for three days, and you start finding these kind of effects, which is it starts moving you from just being focused on the past into a presence with yourself, into a seeing with yourself. And in starting to, you know, what you start to recognize when you start to analyze people's writing when they've gone through this expressive writing is, and you start to say, well, like, what is it that predicts people who do better versus not?

15:06It's what predicts people who do better is that they aren't being a Pollyanna. They aren't just being, oh, everything's great. Everything's fine. I should just be grateful because at least I got to spend 15 years with my father. Right. They're not doing that. What they're doing is they are holding their beautiful, positive experiences alongside their tough, difficult experiences, the pain and the regret. And they're starting to generate a sense of insight and meaning. So for me, as an example, and I want to come back to this teacher because it was such a remarkable thing that she said to me. The example was I kind of found not to force it or not to contrive it.

15:51But when I was doing this writing that over a period of time, I started to connect with like a sense of resilience in myself. So it was like I would write about these difficult experiences and then I would and then I would like over time start recognizing that I just had this like inner sense of resilience and connection and so circling back to your word calm I came out of the writing with a sense of having seen the self a sense of calm does that make it does that yeah it's interesting because when my father passed earlier this year and and thanks for reaching out and sending me a text. It was really thoughtful.

16:31When he passed, I remember everyone was asking me, how are you doing? I was like, to be honest, I'm sad and grateful. I kept saying, I'm really sad that it happened this way, and that he was in an accident for 17 years, and I didn't get to have the relationship that I had with him. And I'm trying to find sense of that and find the meaning in that process. But I'm also really grateful because there were some beautiful times we had together. so I'm sad and I'm grateful and I was just I kept saying that I'm like I'm sad and I'm yeah and it's there's bothness isn't there and I think that's the beauty it's like this this circling back to what we were saying earlier about this narrative that they're good and bad emotions what this does is it sets these emotions up against each other but but we are we are you know that beautiful we contain multitudes like we experience more than a single emotion we can simultaneously hold these things and so the way that we move into a space of holding them is not by making one of them good and one of them bad but rather recognizing that what you feel is what you feel there's such power in the acceptance I don't mean passive resignation I just mean acceptance like this is what I feel and there's such power I just wanted to quickly circle back to something that this teacher said years later so this is this teacher I'm 15 years years years later I go to a conference and there's someone at this conference who gives a talk and she and says you know they're going to be people in your life who've really shaped who you are shaped your experience and if that person doesn't know that they've shaped your life and shaped your experience reach out and let them know yeah so I tracked down this teacher wow and and I find her and I send her you know a bunch of flowers and I like in this card say like you saw me you know you saw me and in seeing me you allowed me to see myself and I said to her but one thing I always wanted to ask you is Lewis I would write this journal and I would write it in pen I would like scroll and poetry and you know, all this kind of like teenage, 15 year old and I would scroll it.

18:57And every day we had this like secret silent correspondence because every day I would hand this journal in and the teacher would then send it back with notes like saying, you sound really sad. Or, you know, she would have these notes, but she always had her notes in this like almost imperceptible pencil. It was like you could barely make out what she was writing. Really? really like pencil. So I said to her, I said to her like when we reconnected, I was like, why did you write in pencil? And she said to me, which I thought was so beautiful, she said to me, Susan, it was your story. It was your story.

19:39And I was simply being witness to your story but you were crafting your story and it reminded me a little bit of um because i know you want to dig into emotional agility and often people say to me you know what is emotional agility and i say well you know i can i can give you a nerd definition but ultimately what my work is about is my work is about seeing it's about seeing and unseeing what do you mean by that yeah well it's about seeing yourself in ways that are healthy and whole and seeing all of you and loving all of you and in seeing ourselves we are then more able to see others too and it reminds me a little bit of Primo Levi, who was a survivor of the Nazi death camps, just in case you thought you were going to have a light conversation.

20:45So Levi was in a death camp and when the camps were liberated, he you know literally on the verge of death was was released and so he and his fellow death camp survivors boarded trains back to their hometowns and Levi described how as the train pulled up into his hometown in Italy there were a whole lot of people waiting on the platforms for them to arrive. And the people on the platforms were so horrified by how emaciated and skinny and bow and haggard and deathly the people on the trains were, the people who had been released, were that they were so horrified by it that they turned away. Wow.

21:52They turned away, and they turned away because they were unable. They were unable to metabolize. They were unable to process. They were unable to see. And Levi described how, in many ways, that experience that he had was, in many ways, even more devastating, more heartbreaking than the experience itself. No way. Wow. And I think that for me, when I talk about seeing versus unseeing, it is really about the thread, which is what does it take for us to see ourselves? What does it take to see others? because here's the thing. We live in a world that really gives primacy to goals and objectives and success and all of these things.

22:48But the way we deal with our inner worlds, the way we see ourselves, the way we deal with our difficult thoughts, like a thought might be I'm not good enough. An emotion might be I'm sad, I'm depressed, I'm grieving. A story might be a story of do I even deserve love? Am I worthy? The way we deal with our inner worlds drives everything. It drives how we love, it drives how we live, how we parent, how we lead, our health behaviors, our ability to achieve those goals. It drives everything. And that is the centrality of my work, which is about healthy seeing. And just to kind of so healthy seeing is about.

23:31Firstly, holding both the joy and the discomfort together. and recognizing that we don't need to be owned by any of it because we are more than those things as well and we are able to move forward towards our values i'm curious i think a lot of people would probably admit maybe not publicly but they probably admit to like someone close to them if they were truly honest with themselves that for a period of their life they didn't believe they're worthy of love. Yeah. There's probably a good amount of people in the world that aren't, as adults, good at receiving love. They don't believe they deserve it.

24:13And maybe there's a whole other spectrum of people that all they do is they love themselves too much. It's like very narcissistic or something like that. But I think there's a lot of people that doubt themselves. They doubt themselves by certain stories they've told themselves, certain things that have happened in their lives that confirm they're not deserving of love. being picked on, bullied, parents, whatever it might be, broken up with boyfriend, girlfriend, all that stuff. How do we believe we are worthy of love? How do we learn to believe that we, as an individual, are deserving of love?

24:46Yeah, that's such a powerful question. And I just want to kind of circle back. You gave narcissism as an example of self-love. They actually hate themselves the most. Actually, narcissism is a manifestation of very often low self-esteem. Yes. I think one of the most important aspects of this fight for worthiness, really, because that is what it is. And I think that... Before the interview continues, if you feel like you're not living your most authentic life, not leaning into your purpose and not living the life that your future self would be extremely proud of. I've written a new book called The Greatness Mindset, and I think you're going to love this.

25:29Through powerful stories, science-backed strategies, and step-by-step guidance, The Greatness Mindset will help you overcome all the different challenges in your life to design the life of your dreams and then turn it into your reality. Make sure to click the link below in the description to get your copy today. Okay, let's get back to this video. All of us as humans at some level fight for worthiness. And I think the really important part of, you know, when I talk about agility versus rigidity, you know, my work is on emotional agility in contrast to emotional rigidity. And so I think what becomes really important in that is if we think about the kinds of thoughts that people have, I've given some examples of like, I'm not good enough, or there's no point in trying.

26:18Emotions, emotions like grief and anger or stories, stories about whether I'm worthy of love. So a really important part of actually being able to move forward in the world with integrity is recognizing that these are normal. And this is really, really important. This thought or this feeling that I'm not enough. Any of it. Any of it and all of it is actually normal. There is nothing good or bad, right or wrong about saying to yourself the automatic thought that says like, gee, I'm going to stuff this up. There is, that is literally your body and your psychology doing the job that it was meant to do, which is to help you to make sense of the world, to adapt and respond.

27:17If you were never concerned about how you sounded, you would have no friends. You wouldn't get anywhere. You wouldn't get anywhere. If you were never concerned about whether you should be fearful about something or not. You'd be dead. You'd be dead. Yeah. Okay, so this whole narrative, which is that there's some thoughts that are good and some thoughts that are bad and some emotions is actually like a, it's a completely false narrative. And so one of the core ways we start to dismantle the narrative is by recognizing that these thoughts, emotions and stories are normal. Yes. They are normal sense-making machines.

28:00You know, you are absolutely, your brain is doing its job when it's helping you to kind of judge, be curious, assess, understand, but what happened, like that's your brain doing its job. So when do we become hooked? When do we become rigid? When are we now being unhealthy? Yeah, when it's holding, when is it holding us back too much? When it's holding us back and when we start being imprisoned by them. Yes. Okay. So in psychological terms, the language for this is fusion. Or in my book on emotional agility, I call this hooked. Hooked meaning like trapped in your feelings, thoughts. You can't progress in life.

28:37So the thought of I'm not good enough or am I going to succeed at this? These are normal. Okay, normal. Fusion or being hooked is when you say, I'm not good enough. Therefore, there's no point in me trying. Okay. Believe it 100%. So, yeah. So what you're starting to do is you're starting to take this normal thought emotional story and you are starting to let it define you. Hence the word fusion. You know, you are now fused. It becomes your identity. It's literally like the emotion owns you rather than you owning it. This is really important. We own our emotions. They don't own us. So when you talk about how do we move into a space of generating a sense of connection with self and self-worth, firstly recognizing that the way you've often responded doesn't need judgment it just needs compassion because it's hard to human it's you know what I mean it's hard to human so so there's firstly that the second thing that becomes important is is and this again connects with this idea of rigidity, which is recognizing that when you were that five-year-old child and you were learning how to survive, that those strategies that you used at that age were actually functional.